THE UNIVERSALITY 
OF CHRIST 



RIGHT KEVEUEXD 

WILLIAM TEMPLE 




Class JBBJZ^ 

Book_ir±_^_ 



conoiiGHr DElPOSir. 



THE UNIVERSALITY 
OF CHRIST 

WILLIAM TEMPLE 



THE UNIVERSALITY 
OF CHRIST 



BY 

WILLIAM TEMPLE 

BISHOP OF MANCHESTER 




NEW Xa^ YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






%^ 



Copyright, 1922, 
By George H. Doran Company 






TRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA 

APR -5 '23 

©Cl A698^73 



PREFACE 

The four lectures published in this volume 
were delivered at the Conference of the 
Student Christian Movement held at Glas- 
gow in January 1921. They were framed 
with a view to suggesting answers to prob- 
lems specially prominent in the minds of 
students at that moment. Their unity, so far 
as they have any, is to be found in a phase 
of contemporary thought, though I hope that 
the philosophic skeleton, on which my sug- 
gested answers to various problems depend, 
is itself a coherent whole. 

I have endeavoured to state my own posi- 
tion without reference to previous contro- 
versies, for the lectures were not addressed 
to theological specialists. But on one point 
I would take this opportunity of expressing 
my relation to classical disputes of the past. 
The Christological controversies of the 
Early Church were conducted in terms of a 
psychology very different from ours, and it 



Ti Preface 

was not found possible to do justice (as I 
think) to certain aspects of the matter 
without becoming involved in philosophical 
and theological conclusions which are con- 
trary to fundamental elements in Christian 
experience. Paul of Samosata was not 
merely wrong in wishing to interpret the 
divinity of Christ in terms of will, but his 
psychology of volition was so defective that 
his attempt resulted in a disastrous theology. 
Nestorius may or may not have been a 
*^Nestorian"; it is significant that he re- 
garded the formula of Chalcedon as a 
triumph for his cause. In any case the 
condemnation of the Monothelite heresy 
went far towards the affirmation of a human 
individuality in the Incarnate Person of 
Jesus Christ. 

It would be absurd to suggest that in 
these lectures I have even adumbrated a 
Christology ; I hope I may have the oppor- 
tunity of undertaking such a task before 
very long. But I wish to state that I have 
quite deliberately revived in substance a 
part, at least, of the contention of Nestorius, 
in the belief that a more adequate psychology 



Preface vii 

can, without any disastrous theological con- 
sequences, do justice to those aspects of truth 
by which he was specially impressed. 

If any one cares to follow out the line of 
thought indicated in these lectures, he will 
find parts of the argument contained in this 
volume more fully developed in The Faith 
and Modern Thought, The Nature of Per- 
sonality, Church and Nation, and especially 
Men^s Creatrix — all of which are published 
by Messrs Macmillan. 

W. Manchester 



CONTENTS 

FAQS 

Preface .; v 

LECTURE I 
The Comparative Method . . < r.i r.i . 13 

LECTURE II 
Is A Universal Religion Possible? .... 43 

LECTURE III 
Christ the Complete Revelation . . . . 85 

LECTURE IV 
Does Christianity Work? . . . -.i v . 117 



Lecture I 

THE COMPARATIVE METHOD 



THE UNIVERSALITY 
OF CHRIST 



Lecture I 



THE COMPARATIVE METHOD 



My subject, plainly, is of vast dimensions, 
and I want first to say a word or two about 
the general plan which. I propose to follow. 
It is quite clear that so great a subject as 
that which has been allotted to me can only 
be dealt with, in a course of four lectures, 
by the deliberate selection of one line of 
approach and then by an outline treatment. 
It is therefore quite likely that my method 
may not be one which supplies a direct 
answer to the questions with which you have 
come to these meetings. But I have chosen 
the line which seems to me most fruitful in 
suggesting answers to the particular ques- 
tions that in my experience are commonest 

13 



14 The Universality of Christ 

in men's minds and are the most urgent in 
my own. So to-day I am going to speak 
about those two methods of study which have 
come recently into the field of inquiry, one 
of them well established, the other by this 
time also having put its claims beyond ques- 
tion — the historical and the comparative 
methods. To follow them in detail would 
be impossible, and we will merely consider 
what they are capable of achieving and what 
lies beyond their province. To-morrow I 
hope to speak about the general conception 
of a universal religion : how far it is philo- 
sophically credible that there should be such 
a religion at all? and if it is credible, what 
are the requirements which we shall have to 
make of any religion if it is to be regarded 
as a claimant for the place of the one univer- 
sal religion? After that we shall come to 
the central theme : Is Christianity qualified 
to meet these requirements ? Is the religion 
of Christ the one universal religion ? In the 
fourth lecture our question will be: If in 
principle it appears that the religion of 
Christ is qualified to be the one universal 
religion, does it work out in practice as satis- 



The Comparative Method 15 

f ying the need ? On the way we shall raise, 
and suggest answers to, a large number of 
questions that are most commonly in the 
minds of thinking people at the present time. 
Further, I have been specially asked to try 
to treat the subject from the philosophical 
and intellectual point of view, and therefore, 
in order that we may achieve something on 
that line, I have deliberately excluded the 
more emotional side of religion, and with it 
a great deal of what is more important in the 
spiritual life of religion. I am anxious to 
say this at the outset, because otherwise an 
attempt to handle the matter as the intellect 
is bound to handle it may seem extraordi- 
narily dry and dull and lifeless. 

The study of religion, like nearly every 
other study, was profoundly modified during^ 
the nineteenth century by the introduction 
of the historical method. The historical 
method was not itself a novelty in the strict 
sense. It is to be found in all ages when men 
have pursued any inquiry in the strictly 
scientific spirit, and it is markedly promi- 
nent in Aristotle. Aristotle subjected the 
religious beliefs of the Greek philosophers 



16 The Universality of Christ 

before his time to a treatment by the histori- 
cal method extraordinarily similar to that 
which modem thinkers apply to various for- 
mulations of religious beliefs, including the 
beliefs of Christianity. But there was 
another great tradition which came from 
Greece, and which in this respect impressed 
itself upon the mind of the Church. That 
was the tradition of Platonism. There can 
be no doubt that the Platonic method is 
rather hostile to any free and full use of the 
historical method, because the thinker who 
is very much akin to Plato in temper of mind 
will always be so concerned about the eternal 
and the unchanging that he is rather impa- 
tient of any discussion of development and 
exceedingly impatient of any suggestion that 
what he believes to be eternal and un- 
changing is itself only a phase in a long 
process of development which has to be 
carried further. 

The contrast in the case of the two Greek 
philosophers is strongest in the sphere of 
politics, where Aristotle has a quite clear 
conception of the processes by which one 
form can give rise to another, and therefore 



The Comparative Method 17 

how progress can be guided, while Plato has 
BO suggestion for the initiation of the ideal 
state except the half humorous one, that all 
citizens over ten years of age should be 
banished and the others trained in the 
national nurseries by a philosopher king. 
That is what happens when you leave the his- 
torical method out. 

Now the Church very naturally adopted 
the Platonic traditions in this matter. The 
Church was concerned with eternal truth. It 
was perfectly sure that in the life and work 
of Christ the eternal truth had been given 
to it by God, and hardly anyone paused to 
consider whether any of the particular ways 
in which, either in previous ages or in the 
age contemporary with any given theologian, 
that truth had been expressed was part of 
the eternal and unchanging, or was merely a 
shape into which it was cast by the mental 
habits of a particular age. Therefore in reli- 
gion the historical method was for a long 
time practically ruled out, and it was not 
until the eighteenth century, I think, that it 
began to be permanently introduced. Then, 
with the general rise of the scientific habit 



18 The Universality of Christ 

of mind in other fields of life which had come 
with the Renaissance, there came an applica- 
tion of the historical method to the field of 
religion also. As we all know, however, it 
was through the development of biology, and 
particularly the application of the doctrine 
of evolution in biology (although the doc- 
trine of evolution was already perfectly fa- 
miliar before the biologists took it up) that 
men's minds were generally so transformed 
that they became unable to think of any 
belief or convention or institution except in 
the terms of its historical origin. During 
the nineteenth century that point of view 
became steadily more and more deeply 
rooted, so that anyone who really thought 
about anything was always thinking under 
the guidance of the question: What is the 
origin of this thing, and through what proc- 
esses has it passed from its origin to its 
present state? 

First we are bound to acknowledge that 
there is immense value in this method. 
There is a value in it as applied to all human 
institutions, because the human race is in 
process of growth and of movement, and 



The Comparative Method 19 

everything which bears the impress of 
human nature must reflect this predominant 
fact about the human species, that it is 
moving on, whether biologically or not, cer- 
tainly morally and politically, from stage 
to stage — ^not always in progress ; sometimes 
in retrogression — ^but always in movement. 
Politically it is found that there is hardly 
any chance of understanding the problems 
with which we are confronted unless we 
study their historical origin. Those who are 
particularly concerned about the reform of 
the economic structure of society have found 
themselves driven more and more to inquire 
into the processes — ^the very lengthy proc- 
esses — ^by which society as we know it to-day 
has reached its present stage. There is no 
means of understanding a thing as it is 
except through knowledge of what it has 
been. 

There has been a particular gain from the 
application of this method to that progress 
in the knowledge of Grod of which we have 
the record in the Bible. So long as men 
ignored the fact of historic growth, and 
tended to equate all periods of human life 



20 The Universality of Christ 

and thought in spiritual value, they were 
confronted by problems, especially in the 
ethics of some parts of the Old Testament, 
to which there was no solution. On the other 
hand, once you are familiar with the thought 
of progress from stage to stage as being fun- 
damental to the method whereby it has 
pleased God to lead mankind into a fuller 
knowledge of Himself, then it becomes not 
a difficulty, but exactly what we should ex- 
pect in advance, when we discover that in 
the earlier periods men had a very partial 
capacity to receive the Divine truth, which 
God is always offering to the full extent of 
that capacity. And so, as we watch the Old 
Testament, one of the plainest marks upon 
the face of it is this, that as men lived as 
far as they were able in fellowship with God, 
they came to understand more and more His 
unchanging truth and nature. It is not that 
He has changed or altered His message to 
men's souls; it is that you cannot pass 
through a pipe a greater volume than that 
pipe is fashioned to contain, and if the re- 
ceptivity of the human soul is limited, then 
the amount of Divine truth which it can re- 



The Comparative Method 21 

ceive is limited thereby. It is as men live 
loyally in the fullest light they have that 
they become more capable of receiving more 
light. It is not that God changed, but that 
men's understanding of Him changed. 

One of the things that the historical 
method will do for the Christian at once is 
to bring him to say that just because Jesus 
Christ is the crown of the revelation He is 
also its criterion, and that everything which 
in other revelations is not compatible with 
what has come to us in Christ, must be, with- 
out any hesitation at all, attributed to the 
human medium through which the revelation 
came, and not to its Divine source. Thereby 
an enormous host of difficulties are swept 
away without in the smallest degree endan- 
gering the belief that God was indeed com- 
municating His truth to men from age to 
age, they receiving it as they were able to 
receive it. 

But there is a difficulty which at present 
I am not going to enter upon fully, because 
it wiU concern us later, although it arises 
immediately. The Christian we say, adopt- 
ing the historical method, is perfectly ready 



22 The Universality of Christ 

to affirm that our Lord, because He is the 
crown, is also the criterion of the revelation. 
But how can He be the crown? How can 
the perfect revelation be already given? 
How is it possible, if we believe in this con- 
stant movement of things — a movement 
which, as far as men are faithful to the high- 
est things they know, is a movement of 
progress — ^how is it possible that centuries 
ago a complete revelation can have been 
given? That is going to be our main theme 
a little later, and I mention it now just to 
show I am not shirking it, but I do not deal 
with it at the moment because a full handling 
is only possible after consideration of the 
topics which we shall have before us to- 
morrow. 

There is another great weakness in the his- 
torical method, if we do not supplement it, 
quite apart from any application to Chris- 
tianity in particular. I said that the other 
tradition, the Platonic tradition, was more 
especially concerned with the eternal and 
unchanging, and it is only in the eternal and 
unchanging that the human mind, let alone 
the hitman spirit, can find rest. The whole 



The Comparative Method 23 

impulse of science itself, when all is said and 
done, is to reach the truth, which is unalter- 
able. We study a changing world, but we 
study it in order to find unchanging princi- 
ples of its change. You study, let us say, 
biological evolution. No biologist is going 
to tell you he has actually observed and care- 
fully noted, with details, the successive 
phases through which life has gone, and by 
which it has moved from its earlier stages 
to those we see it in now. The facts do not 
exist that would enable you to do such a 
thing. All that the biologist can do is to 
experiment with those forms of life which 
do exist now, observe the changes which 
ensue from particular treatment in mating 
and the like, and by means of inferences 
drawn from such experiments and observa- 
tions go back to such scanty relics of the 
earlier forms of life as happen to be avail- 
able, and see whether they will fit into the 
scheme which the experiments have sug- 
gested. He pre-supposes that whatever 
principles govern changes at this moment 
are the same principles which governed 
changes ages back. His real concern is not 



24 The Universality of Christ 

with the detailed change from one phase to 
another, but with the unalterable and eternal 
principle. Evolution is a process of change, 
but the principle of evolution is an un- 
changing principle, and it is with this 
unchanging principle that even science, let 
alone religion, must be primarily concerned. 
It is possible so to exalt the historical method 
of study as to divert science itself from its 
natural and proper object. It is possible so 
to concentrate the mind upon the movement 
and the flux of things that you are left with 
no permanent principles at all, and, there- 
fore, with no means of studying or obtaining 
real knowledge of the movements and the 
flux upon which you are concentrating 
attention. 

If this is so in science, it is still more so in 
religion. No man of any spiritual experi- 
ence would be prepared to tolerate the sug- 
gestion, for example, that when we set out 
to worship, we have first to ascertain the 
precise degree of perfection which God has 
now attained, in order that we may nicely 
adapt our praises. We know that the God 
before whom we humble ourselves is the God 



The Comparative Method 25 

to whom Abraham spoke, if Abraham ex- 
isted as an individual, which after all does 
not very much matter. Our knowledge of 
Him ought to be quite different from Abra- 
ham's, for we have received the illumination 
which was given to the world in Jesus Christ ; 
but it is the same God with whom we are 
entering into communion. If it is not, then 
all the experience which seems to the reli- 
gious man to be Divine fellowship is an illu- 
sion from top to bottom. Eeligion can never 
rest on the historical method. It will use it 
to illuminate the true contents of its own 
traditions. It will use it in order to know 
more fully the way by which God, in His 
mercy, has met the weakness of human na- 
ture from stage to stage, always leading 
steadily on to a fuller truth. But the reli- 
gious man will never be content with the 
belief that there is no permanent truth, that 
there is no unchanging and eternal God, and 
nothing at all except the changing state of 
human consciousness from generation to 
generation. If that turned out to be true, we 
should have to accept it ; but in accepting it 



26 The Universality of Christ 

we should be laying religion once and for 
ever on one side. 

The historical method has lately been sup- 
plemented by what is really only a form of 
the same treatment, but is generally distin- 
guished as the comparative treatment. As 
the historical method compares the different 
periods of time, and tries to discover prin- 
ciples of growth connecting the earlier with 
the later, so the comparative method, with- 
out reference to time, studies the beliefs, the 
conventions, the institutions of the different 
religions, and compares one with another, 
trying to find principles which will unite 
them in some intelligible system. The com- 
parative method in one sense has been very 
familiar in the Christian Church, and I 
think we have to admit there has been some- 
times a definite abuse of it by Christians 
under the influence of their zeal. Sometimes 
it would seem that the mere difference be- 
tween religion as they have known it and the 
beliefs with which they have come in contact 
in other countries has convinced them that if 
their religion is true, all others must be 
merely and simply false. There has been 



The Comparative Method 27 

sometimes also a tendency to press with 
great force upon all the least admirable sides 
either of those other faiths or of the life 
which they have inspired, while the tendency 
in dealing with Christian countries has been 
to exalt the ideal elements and the best prod- 
ucts. Of course, it is very tempting to any 
propagandist of any belief always to produce 
the best product of that which he advocates 
and compare it with the least desirable re- 
sults of possible substitutes. I think it can- 
not be denied that at missionary meetings 
that has been sometimes done. 

One great gain that the scientific use of the 
comparative method in religion has brought 
us is the duty of genuine reverence for other 
men's beliefs. To reverence them is not at 
all the same thing as to accept them as 
necessarily true ; but whatever thoughts any 
human soul is seeking to live by, deserve the 
reverence of every other human soul; and 
the comparative method of religion is the 
intellectual expression of that belief. It 
reste upon the conviction that everything 
that men believe deeply is worth studying 
sympathetically and thoroughly. 



28 The Universality of Christ 

Nowadays, on the whole, the abuse of this 
method seems to me to be commoner in anti- 
Christians than in Christians — a great deal 
commoner. We have the failures of Chris- 
tian civilisation impressed upon us and the 
lofty ideals of some, for example, of the 
great Eastern faiths. That is no more satis- 
factory, either as science or as a means to 
the promotion of religious truth, than the 
other process of which I was speaking a 
moment ago. We have got to be definitely 
on our guard lest in our Christian desire to 
be charitable to those who profess another 
belief than ours, we are led to accept too 
light-heartedly their account of their own 
faith, in contrast with the practical working 
of ours. We must insist that when we talk 
about ideals, we will talk about ideals in 
both cases, and that if we talk about practice, 
we will talk about practice in both cases. We 
must not compare the Christian ideal with 
the practice of Mohammedanism, or the ideal 
of Buddhism with the practice of Christian- 
ity. Neither is legitimate. We must com- 
pare practice with practice, ideal with ideal, 



The Comparative Method 29 

and only so can we go forward, either on a 
scientific basis or on one of justice. 

The strength of this comparative method 
lies in the respect for other men's convic- 
tions. Its weakness, equally with that of the 
historical method, is that it is not itself 
capable of establishing truth. No amount of 
study of the various religions in comparison 
with one another will enable you to deter- 
mine the truth of any or all of them. It will 
only enable you to determine that one is 
better than the other. It would not follow 
that it was true. Its proper use would seem 
to me to be rather this, that we desire to seek 
the best that there is in all faiths and then to 
see whether or not in that faith which we 
have ourselves received, whatever it be, there 
is already contained the elements of value 
which we have discovered elsewhere. If not, 
then if that element seems to us to be genu- 
inely true and valuable, let us try to incor- 
porate it. If it is already there, let us learn 
from those others to develop more fully what 
was always part of our own tradition, though 
we have first seen it because of their empha- 
sis upon it. 



30 The Universality of Christ 

No one individual and no group of indi- 
viduals has exhausted the resources of the 
Christian faith. Indeed I suppose that at 
no one period has the whole universal 
Church been continually realising the whole 
truth of Christianity, even as men have actu- 
ally known it. Most of us live by a compara- 
tively few articles of our professed creed. 
One of the best ways of strengthening spirit- 
ual life and of realising the elements already 
present in our tradition, but to which we 
have hardly attended, is by the study of com- 
parative religions, as it is commonly called, 
though it ought to be called the comparative 
study of religions. This will best help us, 
by enabling us to see where are the weak- 
nesses in our personal or corporate religious 
life, which can be supplied by any element 
which we find to be developed to great ful- 
ness in other faiths. That is a good practical 
and valuable function, and different from 
the function of ascertaining truth. It may 
illuminate the search for truth, but it can 
never conclude it. 

This leads me further to say something 
about the whole point of view which is in- 



The Comparative Method 31 

volved in any great emphasis upon the his- 
torical or comparative methods. They have 
their place by all means ; we cannot do with- 
out them ; we must practice them ; but it is 
also perfectly true that they concern them- 
selves mainly with what men have thought 
and are thinking, and what we are concerned 
about in the spiritual life is not what men 
have thought and are thinking, but what God 
is and what God wills. 

No doubt it is true that in intercourse with 
saintly people of all races we develop our 
knowledge of what God is and wills, but our 
concern must always be with God and not 
with man. Where is the emphasis in the 
Creed? Is it, I believe in God'? Or is it, I 
believe in God"^ There is no doubt where 
the answer of all wholesome religion lies. 
The fact that I believe is of very little con- 
sequence to anyone except myself. The 
thing which is important is that there is a 
God to believe in. There is a story of a 
young lady who asked Dr Jowett: ''Oh, 
Master, do tell me — What do you think about 
God?" to which the Master replied: ''That, 
my dear young lady, is a very unimportant 



32 The Universality of Christ 

question ; the only thing that signifies is what 
He thinks about me." In all our efforts to 
study religious life, whether in our own or 
in other forms of faith, and to build up our 
conscience, our character, even to determine 
our form of service, if these things once get 
into the first place, the whole religious life 
is wrecked ; you have got away from the one 
reality — God, and are centring upon your 
own feelings and activities. I remember 
hearing a real master of the spiritual life, 
Father Kelly, once saying: *^ There used to 
be a thing called theology, which is the Greek 
for thinking about God. It is very old- 
fashioned now. Instead of that there is a 
thing called the philosophy of religion, which 
means thinking about your own nice feel- 
ings. It is very popular." That is the 
danger of all these studies. In the New 
Testament, if it is true at all, we are face to 
face with God ; if that is not true, the New 
Testament is written under an illusion from 
end to end. It would be a very interesting 
illusion, and it would be thoroughly worth 
while to study it, for it has produced great 
effects in the history of the world, but an 



The Comparative Method 33 

illusion all the same. The men who wrote 
the books of the New Testament believed that 
in Jesus Christ, God Himself lived and 
walked about among them. ' ' The Word was 
made flesh and dwelt amongst us.'^ They 
start from there. 

Well, you ask me how we are going to 
establish this matter of truth. That is the 
whole problem of philosophy. But just let 
me put this to you at any rate. The impulse 
of the human mind when it is seeking knowl- 
edge is exactly the same as the impulse of 
the human spirit when it is seeking goodness. 
It is an impulse towards totality. It is a 
desire to see things as a whole — to see one's 
self, if at all, only as an element in that 
whole. Logic is the science of this impulse 
towards totality. That is why Dr Bosanquet 
says that the spirit of logic is self-sacrifice. 
Just as in the moral and political world the 
one solution of our problems is always to 
see that, in the whole, we fit ourselves in the 
right place, fully doing our part in that 
place, but not claiming a place for which we 
are not fitted : so in the life of the mind the 
object is always to see one great entire sys- 



34 The Universality of Christ 

tern, wMch includes all the facts, each in its 
own place, so that together they constitute 
the totality which determines for them their 
function. 

The system that is capable in this way of 
gathering up all the facts of experience in 
one single whole, co-relating them all to- 
gether, must also be in its own governing 
principle one satisfactory to reason and 
therefore akin to the human mind. That is 
the philosophical claim, and there is no other 
test of truth, so far as I know, more satisfy- 
ing than that. 

While it is clear that this test of truth is 
never finally applicable, we are able to apply 
it in increasing measure as our experience 
develops; and as our knowledge grows it 
becomes more and more possible to see how 
the inorganic and the organic, the mental 
and physical worlds are all related in one 
single whole, governed by a spiritual princi- 
ple. If that is so, we may claim to be on the 
way to truth. 

Now it is perfectly plain that Christianity, 
whether in the New Testament or in the 
Church from that day to this, has never made 



The Comparative Method 35 

a claim to be acknowledged chiefly on intel- 
lectual grounds, and therefore all such in- 
quiries as we are engaged upon in this lec- 
ture can never be more than a preparatory 
clearing away of obstacles, opening up ave- 
nues of approach. Christianity is faith, not 
knowledge; and the two are not the same. 
The spiritual value depends upon its being 
faith. You have that faith when a man says : 
*^It would be so splendid if this were true 
that I will always live as if it were true." 
That is faith, and its spiritual value depends 
on its intellectual uncertainty. If once our 
faith became intellectually demonstrable, we 
should become higher or lower than the 
spiritual beings we are ; but we should not 
have the same spiritual opportunity which is 
ours, the opportunity to stake our lives upon 
a noble hazard. Christianity comes with the 
claim to be the truth, and therefore to pro- 
vide us with an all-embracing principle 
which will unite all parts of the universe in 
a complete totality. We are bound to go on 
using our minds to see whether that is so. 
We have got to think it out both in theory 
and in practice, and try to use it as a solution 



36 The Universality of Christ 

of our problems; and we should welcome 
what light the historical or comparative 
method has to bring. We are not to close 
our minds against any knowledge; for all 
knowledge is knowledge of the world, and 
the world is God's creation. If we are 
frightened of any kind of knowledge, it 
means that we have not really staked our 
lives on the belief that the world is Grod's 
and that God has made Himself known to us 
through Christ. It means that we are afraid 
that in the last resort, if we think about it 
hard enough, we shall find it is not true. An 
enormous amount of obscurantism finds its 
root in that kind of infidelity. If we stake 
ourselves mentally, as well as morally and 
spiritually, on the belief that it is the truth, 
we shall welcome all knowledge from all 
quarters, and confidently expect to find that 
whatever is true in other faiths is present, 
at least in germ, in the Christian faith, and 
that we have only to develop, under the stim- 
ulus of what we see in others, something 
which we have already inherited. 

But Christianity, coming with this claim, 
is profoundly unaccommodating; it refuses 



The Comparative Method 37 

ito fit into a synthesis side by side with other 
systems, because it says it is the truth. 
When people say: ^'Let us have a confer- 
ence of all peoples of all religions, and find 
out what is good in each of them, and so see 
what is the real religion,'' Christianity will 
haye no interest in such a proposal. It will 
say: ^^That will simply mean a watering 
down of the knowledge of God, which I have 
got, to suit others who have less. I dare not 
deny the things which have come to me 
through the Divine tradition and my own 
experience"; and similarly when any more 
up-to-date, modern-fashioned people say 
that the only charitable thing after all, and 
therefore the only Christian thing, is to sup- 
pose that all religions are equally true, and 
that the form which religion takes in differ- 
ent parts of the world is a matter of tempera- 
ment — ^that it attacks Western people as 
Christianity, the Arabian as Mohammedan- 
ism, the Indian as Buddhism, the Chinese as 
Confucianism, and so on, and that all those 
are just variations of the one pure essential 
religion, we shall have to make two answers. 
First, if that is so, your precious religion is 



38 The Universality of Christ 

worth exactly nothing. It is only its differ- 
ent forms that give it meaning. The vague 
belief in God, which you find in the back- 
ground of all the faiths of the world, is not 
a driving or regenerative power. It is sim- 
ply no use at all. It will do nothing for you 
but give you what a certain kind of people 
call the ^^ cosmic consciousness," which is an 
element of religious experience, a sense of 
being at one with the great spirit which sus- 
tains the universe. But if you get no further 
than that, you will undergo a process which 
is perpetually occurring to students of all 
religions. You will transform what is in its 
essence spiritual and moral into something 
purely aesthetic. But there is this supreme 
difference between the spiritual and the 
merely aesthetic; the aesthetic experience 
laj^s no obligation upon conscience. 

You can go to a concert and enjoy a 
symphony of Beethoven, and be elevated in 
feeling to the seventh heaven ; and yet when 
you go out you do not feel any more chari- 
table to the people in the T3us you go home 
in; on the other hand you find them more 
intolerable than ever. And if that is all you 



The Comparative Method 39 

are going to get out of the ' ' cosmic conscious- 
ness," and there is nothing else beyond it, 
you have taken the whole strength out of 
religion. Christianity was proscribed under 
the Roman Empire because it refused to take 
ist place as one of the tolerated faiths. 
**No," it said; ^^ours is the true religion." 
It was almost impossible in those days of 
conflict for the early Christians to go on, and 
explain that no doubt each of the other reli- 
gions embodied some part of the whole truth 
which Christianity possessed. That is a 
point of view which is practically impossible 
in the actual heat of a bitter and persecuting 
conflict. But the claim of Christianity is not 
that it is one among a number of religions, 
all of which are good, each for a different 
set of people, nor indeed that it is primarily 
a drug for men's diseases at all, in which 
case we might suppose that there would be 
different drugs for different diseases; it 
claims that it is the truth about this world 
in which we live, and that from it and 
through it alone can you find in any fulness 
the knowledge of the God who made and who 
rules the world, and is guiding it to the ful- 
filment of His own purpose. 



Lecture II 

IS A UNIVERSAL RELIGION POSSIBLE? 



■Lecture II 

IS A UNIVERSAL RELIGION POSSIBLE? 

Testekday we were considering two closely 
related methods of study applied to human 
religion: the historical, which is a compari- 
son of what men have believed and experi- 
enced at different dates; and the compara- 
tive, which is a comparison as a rule of what 
men believe and experience at the present 
day in different places. Both of them, as 
we saw, had this mark ; they are concerned 
with religion on its psychological side. They 
are concerned with religion as an activity of 
the human soul. And when we are taking 
steps to strengthen our devotional life or to 
commend our faith to those who do not at 
present accept it, we are bound to take 
notice of these psychological conditions. In 
strengthening the devotional life we have to 
understand what our own condition is in 
order that we may wisely handle it. We 

43 



'44i The Universality of Christ 

have to understand the kind of stimuli to 
which we re-act and so forth. In exactly the 
same way, if we want to commend our faith 
to other people, we must know the working 
of their minds sufficiently to realise which 
are the points that they can most easily ap- 
prehend first, so that having, as it were, got 
their footing in the world of faith, they may 
gradually make their own way in it, and 
become free of it as a whole. There is there- 
fore this absolutely necessary place for the 
psychological study of religion. 

But there is another danger about it, be- 
sides those which I mentioned yesterday, and 
which is more especially relevant to the 
theme that is to occupy us to-day. It is a 
danger, most clearly illustrated, I think, by 
Professor William James's well-known 
book. Varieties of Religious Experience. 
James virtually limits the term ^^ religious 
experience" to particular psychological oc- 
currences, and moreover, to abnormal psy- 
chological occurrences. But the appeal of 
the Christian to religious experience as the 
warrant for his faith is not an appeal to 
particular ecstasies or to conversion or even 



A Universal Religion 45 

to moments at one time or another of com- 
munion with the Divine — at least it is not 
to these exclusively. It is primarily to the 
whole experience of life as that is illumined 
and transformed by religious faith. Reli- 
gious experience, as an evidence of the truth 
of religion, is not to be found mainly in 
momentary raptures, but rather in the whole 
outlook upon life which faith supplies, and 
the way in which experience from day to day 
perpetually vindicates that outlook. That is 
religious experience. It is not a particular 
episode in the midst of a non-religious ex- 
perience ; it is an experience of life and of 
the world which is religious through and 
through. 

But this is a much more difficult thing for 
the psychologist to study. You can hardly 
deal with it by the method of questionnaires. 
And, having alluded to that method, let me 
remind you of its weakness. The American 
psychologists have put much stress on it; 
but it is misleading. If I were to send out 
an enormous number of questions to some 
thousands of people in England, taking them 
as far as I could at haphazard, asking them 



46 The Universality of Christ 

whether they had been converted at any- 
particular moment in life, and whether their 
religious experiences of a particular kind 
were mostly connected with religious ob- 
servances or independent of them, and so 
forth, a large proportion of the people who 
received that list of questions — ^the sanest 
and most ordinary sort of people — would 
immediately throw it into the waste-paper 
basket. The people who would answer would 
for the most part be people who have an 
interest in their own states. And therefore 
the whole method of trying to estimate the 
history and quality of religious life by means 
of questionnaires sent out broadcast tends to 
put the investigator into the hands of people 
who are spiritual valetudinarians. There 
can be no doubt that the psychological in- 
quiry, most valuable as it has been, is vitiated 
to some extent by that fact. What you get 
is rather a kind of inventory of spiritual 
pathology than a trustworthy account of the 
spiritual processes of ordinary men and 
women. There is only one way in which we 
can escape from the inevitable untrustwor- 
thiness of all psychological forms of pro- 



A Universal Religion 47 

cedure. Use them by all means for illmnina- 
tion and supplement; but there is only one 
way of escaping from the bias which always 
besets those who give their special attention 
to states of human consciousness, and that is 
to turn away from the human interest in reli- 
gion altogether towards the object — ^truth, 
reality, God. 

And here let me remark incidentally that 
this is quite plainly the way of salvation now 
and always. It is the way of salvation in 
science, and it is the way of salvation in 
religion ; for either in science or in religion, 
the first requirement is that a man should 
stop troubling very much about himself and 
concern himself with the object in hand. 
The scientist must not think of the result 
he wants from his experiments; he must 
look to see what really does happen. He 
has got to put all his predilections aside;, 
he must not be primarily interested, for ex- 
ample, in providing evidence for the theories 
on which his reputation rests. He must be 
concerned with the facts and not with his 
desires ; otherwise he will be no true scientist. 
And it is the same in religion. We must give 



^48 The Universality of Christ 

ourselves over to the search for the real truth 
concerning God and His world. ^ ' Thou hast 
made us for Thyself, and our souls are rest- 
less until they find rest in Thee. " It is only 
in the truth that they will find rest, and not 
in any devices of our contriving that may 
accord with what we suppose will bring us 
satisfaction. 

In this objectivity of mind there is fellow- 
ship. So far as men are concerned with the 
object of their inquiry, they are brought 
together, for they have a common interest. 
As knowledge advances, all those who love 
knowledge can rejoice together. But if what 
the scientist is concerned about is not the in- 
crease of knowledge, but his own reputation, 
then, of course, he will be jealous when an- 
other makes a great discovery. The fellow- 
ship of science will be broken up. In the 
spiritual world it is the same. When we are 
all concentrated upon God and His service, 
we are brought into fellowship with one 
another; and we can rejoice in one another's 
achievements. But if what we are concerned 
about is primarily our individual spiritual 
state, or still worse, our spiritual reputation, 



A Universal Religion 49 

then of course we begin to attend to what is 
ours distinctively, and so fall into separation 
from one another, and at last into antago- 
nism. The way of salvation in science and 
in the spiritual life here, as in the case I 
mentioned yesterday, is still identical; it is 
that a man should forget all about himself in 
concentration on the object. The object, of 
course, is ultimate truth. 

What is required of any conception which 
will warrant the attribution to it of ultimate 
truth is, as I said yesterday, that it be a 
totality — that it really include all the facts 
and include them as parts of one whole. It is 
worth while to remind ourselves how very 
much scientific study has helped us in the 
appreciation of this philosophic truth. Peo- 
ple used once to ask with all seriousness the 
problems symbolically expressed in the ques- 
tion: If the earth stands on the elephant 
and the elephant stands on the tortoise, what 
does the tortoise stand on ? That was a real 
problem; if all things fell downwards, they 
would all accumulate at the bottom; or if 
there is no bottom and they merely fall for 
ever, what is the actual difference between 



So The Universality of Christ 

that and standing still ? Science tells us that 
if the elephant stands on the tortoise, the 
tortoise stands on the elephant. If I stand 
on the earth, the earth stands on me; and 
there are people walking about in Australia, 
from our point of view, with their heads 
downwards. 

It is all quite familiar, but very impor- 
tant. The system is not one in which you 
have one peg which is fixed somehow irre- 
trievably, and then a number of links de- 
pending upon this, the whole chain depend- 
ing at last upon the original peg. The 
system of reality, as science has revealed it 
to us in the physical universe, is a whole in 
which all the parts sustain one another in an 
articulated entirety. The method of the 
syllogism in logic, going down from cer- 
tainty about a general proposition to the 
inferences that may be drawn from it, en- 
tirely misrepresents the nature of real truth. 
It was never a method of finding truth ; it 
was a method of convincing opponents. 
The Greeks indulged in the noble and 
intellectual game of philosophic argument. 
Somehow it had to be settled who had won. 



A Universal Beligion 51 

The syllogistic logic stated the rules of the 
game, and made a decision as to the winner 
possible. It is not a method of science, but a 
method of argument. As such it is both valid 
and useful. We are rightly eager to employ 
it to-day ; we want to say to the statesman, 
to the trader, to the editor : Are you a Chris- 
tian'? If so, you are committed to this or 
that particular action. That is a perfectly 
legitimate form of argument, but it is not a 
way of finding ultimate truth. It is a way in 
which you may find some particular truth. 
But the truth of any department of reality 
and of reality as a whole is to be found by 
building up all the factors of experience on 
which you can lay your hands in such a way 
that they dovetail into one another in a 
system which is both coherent and com- 
prehensive. 

Now this system, when you have got it, 
must contain its own explanation. When 
you look at it you must have no need to ask 
a further question. If you can still ask the 
question : If the world is so, why in the world 
should it be so ? your truth is not ultimate. 
It does not give the final ground of all that 



52 The Universality of Christ 

is. How are you to reach a principle that 
does this? I am bound to be dogmatic; 
there is no time to work out possible alter- 
natives to the only theory that seems to me 
to be conceivable. As far as our experience 
goes, I suggest to you, there is one principle 
and one principle only that we know which 
contains its own ground, and that is what 
we call purpose or will, which is spirit in 
action. When you find material ob j ects with 
no sort of ascertainable purpose in their 
arrangement, you are not driven to ask how 
they came to be as they are, beyond such 
explanation as the purely physical causes 
can give you. You have a pile of boulders 
on the top of some mountain, and the 
geologist explains the processes by which, 
according to his system of inferences, these 
boulders came to be placed as they are now; 
and probably you are satisfied. You may 
raise the question why geological processes 
generally should be what they are. Most 
people do not trouble to do so, but it is per- 
fectly legitimate ; and the mind is then not 
satisfied by any further geologising. But 
if 3^ou find stones so arranged in little heaps 



A Universal Religion 53 

across a hill that they mark the easy way 
through the pass from one valley to another, 
you would be astonished to learn that this 
was entirely fortuitous, and that they had 
come there through geological processes only. 
On the other hand you are satisfied when 
you are told that they had been placed there 
by man for the intelligible purpose of mark- 
ing a path, so that men might find their way 
in any mist. The moment that you arrive 
at something recognised by yourself as an 
intelligible ground determining the action 
of spirit in organising matter in a certain 
way, the mind is in fact satisfied.^ 

That is, of course, why Plato said that the 
explanation of the universe is to be found 
at last in the Idea of Good ; and he goes on — 
in that extremist manner, which makes one 
of his charms — to say, ^'I want some philoso- 
pher to tell me whether the earth is round 
or flat by proving which it is better that it 
should be." 

Now I cannot wait to ask members of this 
audience whether in fact they have alterna- 
tives to the spiritual hypothesis whereby we 

* Cf. Lecture I in my volume, The Faith and Modern Thought. 



54 The Universality of Christ 

may get a system of truth wMch is inherently 
self-explanatory ; and I must go on with the 
suggestion that in our experience, as a mat- 
ter of fact, nothing else is self-explanatory 
except a will seeking good that we under- 
stand. Then we look at the world, and what 
do we find % We find it consists of a number 
of grades of being. It may be impossible to 
mark them off sharply from one another, but 
in their full development they are perfectly 
distinct — ^just as a boy of ten is a boy, and a 
man of fifty is a man, and an undergraduate 
is a hybrid. The law in its rough and ready 
way says that until you are twenty-one you 
are irresponsible, at any rate in certain re- 
lationships of life, but when you are twenty- 
one you are responsible. I did not find that 
my twenty-first birthday made any great dif- 
ference to me in my moral and spiritual re- 
lationships ; the only thing I noticed was that 
it was the first of my birthdays that nobody 
mentioned throughout the day. We need not 
mind this inability to draw a distinguishing 
line at any particular point. There is a dif- 
ference between a baby in a cradle and a man 
in the fulness of his powers, though there 



A Universal Religion 55 

may be a continuous process from one to the 
other. So in the world. You have a purely 
physical world, a world of brute Things,, 
where we are able to assume that there is 
no purpose, no emotion, no thought, and 
even no sentience. That may not be philo- 
sophically quite correct, but we generally 
find it near enough for practical purposes ; 
indeed if when you are playing golf you 
wonder if it will hurt the ball that you 
should hit it harder, you will find that it puts 
you off your game. 

We begin with the level at which we sup- 
pose that there are none of those properties 
which we associate with life or with spirit. 
Then we come to the organic world, the vege- 
table world. There is already life, although 
we generally suppose there is no sentience, 
thought, feeling, or purpose. You go on to 
the animal world, where there is certainly 
sentience, where there may be some degree 
of thought (as, in the higher animals, there 
undoubtedly is), and where in at least some 
animal races there is clear trace of genuine 
purpose. Beyond that you have the human 



56 The Universality of Christ 

race which possesses all those marks; and 
there may be further developments still to 
come which will introduce elements into the 
complexity of life as completely unknown to 
us as our purpose for the moral unification 
of mankind is presumably unknown to the 
cabbage. When we look we see further that 
each of these grades only achieves the fulness 
of its own potentiality when it is possessed 
by the higher grade. Nobody could ever de- 
duce merely from the physical properties of 
matter that it was capable of the infinite deli- 
cacy of feeling that lies, let us say, in the 
artist's fingers. It is only when we look at 
the lower grades from the point of view of 
the higher and more complex that we begin 
to understand the lower themselves. Again, 
we find that there is a definite inter-action 
in those organisms where all the grades are 
present together. I am not arguing the case 
now, but it seems to me quite plain that there 
is definite inter-action of spirit and matter, 
and that the state of our body does undoubt- 
edly affect, certainly our emotional condi- 
tion, very often even our purpose, while 



A Universal Religion 57 

the whole point about our purpose is that it 
is capable of directing our physical organ- 
ism. In other words, life as we know it is 
sacramental through and through, and from 
top to bottom. The principle of the whole 
system is that matter finds its real meaning 
when it is taken up into the purpose of 
spirit and is utilised in that service, and that 
spirit only comes to itself, only expresses it- 
self to other spirits but also only comes to 
full consciousness of its own meaning, when 
it possesses and directs matter. Spirit alone, 
with no material embodiment, accomplishes 
at least very little and perhaps nothing at all 
in this world ; and that, no doubt, is why good 
intentions, which are of course purely spirit- 
ual, pave the way to hell. It is only when 
some concrete embodiment is found that 
spirit becomes real and active. In its own 
nature it is the function of matter to be dom- 
inated by spirit ; it is the function of spirit to 
dominate matter. If that is so, and it is also 
true that in that spiritual principle you have 
one that is in itself self-explanatory, you 
have immensely strengthened the intellectual 



58 The Universality of Christ 

case for the hypothesis that spirit is the ex- 
planation of the world/ 

But if the explanation of the world — the 
principle that gives unity and coherence to 
the whole — is to be found in spirit, it must 
be in one spirit. A multiplicity of Beings 
cannot give unity to the whole of Being. 
This leads us to the supreme question of re- 
ligion : If such a spirit exists, how is its na- 
ture to be known ? It is not enough to say 
that the world is undoubtedly spiritual. It 
must be controlled by a spirit so conceived or 
known as to be adequate to account for our 
experience and also satisfactory to our moral 
aspirations, which are themselves among the 
facts of the universe. How is the ultimate 
truth to be known? 

You will say at once that this is the precise 
object of philosophy. Yes, it is. But the 
method of philosophy, though perfectly 
sound in principle, will not serve our turn, 
for the simple reason that it requires eternity 
for its application. Philosophy will only 

*For a fuller statement of the substance of this paragraph 
I may perhaps refer to my article on "The Sacramental 
Principle" in The Pilgrim for January 1921 j also to my 
volume, The Nature of Personality. 



A Universal Religion 59 

bring you a sure knowledge of the ultimate 
truth when you have first of all acquired 
knowledge of the whole universe and have 
succeeded in constructing a theory adequate 
to the whole universe. It is at least probable 
that there are many kinds of existence 
of which we are quite incapable, in our pres- 
ent state, of becoming aware at all; so at 
least religious men of old have believed: 
**Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither 
hath it entered into the heart of man to con- 
ceive what good things the Lord hath pre- 
pared for them that love Him." Human 
nature does not exhaust the capacity of the 
universe. There may even be forms of ex- 
perience possible to other kinds of animals 
through sense organs which we do not pos- 
sess, and from which we are shut out; and 
these facts have all got to be brought into 
your unified system before you have the right 
to close it. If you have a system of philos- 
ophy which is perfectly neat and compact 
on the basis of your own experience only, you 
can know for an absolute certainty that it is 
wrong. Therefore, while we ought to pursue 
the philosophical method so far as we can, 



60 The Universality of Christ 

perpetually seeking new knowledge and the 
co-relation of it with old knowledge, we can- 
not expect that we are going in our lifetime, 
or in the lifetime of our descendants for 
thousands of generations, or possibly in the 
existence of this planet at all, to find the 
ultimate truth by that method; and it is 
always possible that those elements which 
we cannot reach by any observations of ours 
may be among the most important for a cor- 
rect inference. 

The other method by which knowledge — or 
rather, let me say, apprehension — of the ul- 
timate truth might come to us, is by revela- 
tion on the part of the Supreme Spirit whom 
we have found to be the most probable in- 
tellectual explanation of the world. If once 
you grant intellectually that there is such a 
Being, who may most fitly be thought of by 
us under the categories of will and purpose, 
then there is no difficulty whatsoever in the 
general conception that He may reveal Him- 
self to man. On the contrary, there is a great 
deal of difficulty in the supposition that He 
will refrain from doing so. He has made us 
with capacities to receive the truth, at least 



A Universal Religion 61 

in some measure. We need it for our guid- 
ance through life. It will be a strange thing 
if He does not offer it in such measure at 
least as we can receive. Philosophically a 
Divine revelation is the most natural thing 
in the world, provided that your philosophy 
is, in general, a spiritual philosophy. 

In these days, though the main interest in 
religious study has been largely on the psy- 
chological rather than the Divine side, there 
is no great tendency to question the possibil- 
ity of a Divine revelation; but there is a 
great tendency to question the possibility of 
one unique and universal revelation. There 
is a tendency to suppose that this supreme 
Spirit must of necessity manifest Himself 
in quite different forms to different people, 
showing different elements of His nature to 
different civilisations and so forth. And of 
course, there is a groundwork of truth in 
that contention. It is certainly true that the 
West and the East will tend, even if there' 
be one revelation given, to apprehend most 
easily different elements within it, and also 
probably to ignore other elements that are 
really there. It may be that from one Divine 



62 The Universality of Christ 

act of revelation there may arise a number 
of quite different general theories about the 
nature of God simply because the human 
recipients of this revelation have attended 
to different elements in the gift put before 
them. This is true ; but it is not a necessary 
consequence of this, that a single act of reve- 
lation, which may become the focussing point 
of all truth for all mankind, is out of the 
question. Nor is it true that there could 
not be a particular manifestation that is 
adequate to the universal truth, if you are 
thinking in terms of Spirit. If you think in 
terms of matter, it would be true ; and a great 
deal of the confusion in our minds results 
from the fact that we have materialistic con- 
ceptions even in our handling of spiritual 
things. 

One of the leading heresies of the present 
moment is the heresy that there is no such 
thing as matter, that it is an illusion. If 
you will study scientific researches into the 
nature of matter, I think you will be rather 
surprised by the complexity of the illusion 
which the human mind seems to have de- 
veloped out of itself. That, however, while 



A Universal Religion 63 

it is astonishing, would still be possible. But 
you notice this result in any of the thinkers 
who deny the existence of matter ; a nemesis 
follows, in that they proceed to set up a ma- 
terialistic conception of spirit, and leave 
themselves after all with what is really a 
materialistic universe. When you find such 
an argument as this : ^^If God is Spirit and 
God is everywhere, there is no room for mat- 
ter," you know that the author had a purely 
materialistic conception of spirit. Spirit 
not occupy space. You may have spirit 
everywhere and the whole universe open for 
material existence as well. There is no con- 
tradiction. Spirit does not manifest itself 
through the occupation of space, but in 
thinking and feeling, in loving and hating; 
and these things don't take up any room. 
You can have any number of stars in a uni- 
verse in which people love one another. 

We must begin by doing full justice to 
material existence, recognising it as part of 
the universe, and indeed as the groundwork 
of the universe, which exists for the sake of 
the superstructure as the foundations of 
every building do ; and then we are free to 



64 The Universality of Christ 

go on with our inquiry into the nature of 
spirit with not nearly so much danger that 
the material elements in nature are going to 
obtrude themselves where they are genuinely 
out of place. This inquiry must be con- 
ducted in terms of quality, and not in the 
terms of quantity, which belong to matter. 
It is true that only a portion of any material 
substance could be manifested in a particular 
place or at a particular time. But that is 
not true of quality, which is the category- 
appropriate to spirit. People sometimes 
say: **How much of God was revealed in 
Christ? If you believe as a Christian that 
God was revealed in Christ, how much of 
Him was revealed*?" Well, all of Him that 
is relevant : His love, and His holiness, which 
is part of His love, is all there. If the love 
that was in Christ was a perfect love for all 
men, there is nothing that can make it any 
greater, for it is already an infinite. You 
have reached a logical limit, seen to be a limit 
beyond which it is self -contradictory that 
you should ask to go ; there cannot be more 
love than absolute self -giving to all. 

Further, we get considerable help here, I 



A Universal Religion ^5 

think, from our experience in that sphere 
where man comes nearest to spiritual crea- 
tion, short of the moral and religious life. 
That is in the sphere of art. In art a man is 
to an enormous extent master of his material. 
The greater the artist, the more master of it 
he is. And the whole object of art — an ob- 
ject sometimes, surely, achieved under the 
limited conditions in which every human 
artist must work — ^is to give a perfect indi- 
vidual embodiment of a universal truth or 
value. If a poem is a really good poem 
there is no way of telling anybody what it 
means, except by reading it to him. If he 
says ^^I cannot see it," you must read it to 
him again. You may give him hints to put 
him on the track ; you may give him an analy- 
sis to show him the skeleton inside the living 
frame; but if you want him to know what 
the poet said you must read him the poet's 
words. Here, in the great phrase of Emer- 
son, **The word is one with that it tells of."^ 
There is no other expression of the poet's 
meaning, though its range may be immense ;: 
there is no other expression of that whole 
meaning except this one concrete thing 



66 The Universality of Christ 

whicli, on its physical side, is a r.amber of 
black marks on white paper. It is the same 
with other branches of art. In artistic ac- 
tivity, and in artistic appreciation we do, as 
a matter of fact, find particular cases which 
are adequate representations of the univer- 
sal that lies behind them. 

It is the same in moral conduct. The life 
of a great man is the real expression, not one 
possible alternative expression, but the one 
irreplaceable expression of the spirit, the 
general universal ^ spirit, which is his per- 
sonality. This spirit is the principle that 
gathers them all together and gives them 
their meaning. 

Further, it is worth mentioning (although 
it is only indirectly relevant to my point this 
morning, and we shall return to it in the last 
lecture) — you only get the meaning which 
gives value to all the parts when the whole 
is already present. If you think of any short 
poem you see at once that the meaning of it, 
the spirit of it, entirely determines each ex- 
pression. It is a perfectly coherent and sys- 

^I don^t mean, of course, *'universar' as related to the 
cosmos, but universal as related to all his particular actions at 
different times. 



A Universal Religion 67 

tematic whole ; but you cannot deduce from 
the earlier parts what the later ones are 
going to be. It is not necessitated along the 
line of efficient causation where the antece- 
dent determines the consequent. No one who 
has read the line, *' When I consider how my 
light is spent/' can deduce the remainder of 
the poem, or know that the poet a few lines 
later will say ^^His state is kingly." It is 
only when you get to the end, when you have 
grasped the whole of the poet's meaning, 
which determines with absolute precision the 
character and the place of all the parts, that 
you realise the necessity that each part 
should be what it is. The system of meaning 
fixes the nature or place of every word ; but 
that system of meaning is only complete 
when the poem is finished. From this it fol- 
lows that the true value of any occurrence 
may depend upon the future ; the fact cannot 
be altered, but the value of the fact can be 
altered ; and the real value of every fact is 
unknown until the course of history is com- 
plete.^ 
Now we have to ask whether what has 

* Por the whole argument from Art, cf . Mens Creatrix. 



68 The Universality of Christ 

been said about the perfect embodiment of 
universal truth in a particular instance can 
be applied to the infinite spirit, to the spirit 
whose will is the ground of all existing 
things ? Well, it all depends on whether you 
think the infinite Being has or has not a 
moral character. If the infinite Being is a 
mere undifferentiated substance, then I sug- 
gest, and even insist, that he fails to meet the 
demand for a self-explanatory principle. He 
is himself a mere brute fact. He is a block 
of being. If the ultimate reality is just 
substance without any quality or character — 
a mere stuff, as it were, which flowing into 
different moulds assumes different forms 
and characters, under the conditions of finite 
existence — it explains nothing whatever. It 
does not explain why the moulds are what 
they are, or why they succeed one another as 
they do. There can be no relation whatever 
between such a Being and human aspira- 
tions, He fails to explain both himself and 
the most important part of our experience. 
He is philosophically worthless. 

But if the infinite Being has character, 
that character can be made known. Charac- 



A Universal Religion 69 

ter always depends for its reality on its defi- 
niteness. When you speak of a '^man of 
character," you mean one the outlines of 
whose moral being are sharply cut, and on 
whom you can depend in all ways. It is the 
exact expression, for there is no real charac- 
ter in one whose spiritual state from moment 
to moment depends entirely on the accidental 
environment in which he finds himself. Such 
a being is merely reacting to external stimuli 
in the way that matter itself reacts ; and it is 
in this lack of self -originated action that 
matter is most different from spirit. There 
is no difficulty in presuming that the infinite 
Being has character, if your analogy is not 
an indefinite substance, like a sort of clay 
which is to be moulded into a number of 
shapes, but is purpose and will. 

It is true that a Being who has character 
is not logically infinite. If He is love. He is 
not hate ; if He is righteous. He is not capri- 
cious : and so forth. But there is no logical 
ground for demanding as the explanation of 
the universe a Being who is logically infinite. 
Being in general is a possible object of con- 
templation, but it is the thinnest and emp- 



70 The Universality of Christ 

tiest of all concepts. What philosophy re- 
quires is a Being who is infinite in the sense 
that He depends on nothing other than Him- 
self while all else depends on Him. Such a 
Being must be conceived (as we saw) in 
terms of Will. And Will is only real in the 
degree in which it is definite. 

It still remains a great problem, the su- 
preme religious problem, how a purpose and 
will such as can satisfy our moral aspirations 
can also be the ground of the universe in 
which we live. This is the problem of evil, 
which becomes all the greater in proportion 
as you insist on the character of the ultimate 
Being. It is only those people who have a 
vivid conception and conviction of the holi- 
ness of God who are sharply brought up 
against the problem of evil. You find it gov- 
erning the Hebrew literature as it does no 
other ancient literature, because the He- 
brews felt the contradiction between their 
experience and the Holy God to whom in 
their worship they had drawn near. You 
find it pretty strong in Plato, because he has 
a great conviction that only Good can ex- 
plain things. It is hardly present in Aris- 



A Universal Religion 71 

totle, who has not that great conviction and 
whose doctrine of the ultimate source of 
being is simply arrived at by a line of phys- 
ical argument — ^the necessity of a being who 
can set things in motion without itself being 
set in motion by anything else. It is in pro- 
portion as men believe in the character of 
the infinite Spirit that they are brought up 
against evil in the finite world. But to that 
problem we shall return a little later. 

There is no sort of intellectual or philo- 
sophical difficulty in supposing that this uni- 
verse is grounded in an infinite spiritual pur- 
pose and will; in fact, the preponderant 
weight of argiunent is decisively on that side. 
And if it be so, there is no difficulty in prin- 
ciple about the occurrence of one particular 
manifestation of that character in its perfect 
embodiment. But there are certain condi- 
tions that the manifestation has got to fulfil. 
It cannot take the form of an intellectual 
iStatement ; it cannot be a doctrine ; because 
such a doctrine would either be a very partial 
formula or else entirely surpass our capacity 
to apprehend. Just because the philosophi- 
cal method cannot be adequately applied by 



72 The Universality of Christ 

the finite mind in a finite period, therefore 
nothing that is in the nature of a philosophi- 
cal statement or disquisition could conceiv- 
ably be the form in which the final and uni- 
versal revelation is made. It is only possible 
in one way. It is possible in a life, which is 
the proper mode for any spiritual manifesta- 
tion in this world. 

What, then, becomes of the authority of 
Church doctrines? It was never ultimate. 
When I say the creed, I say '^I believe in 
God"; but I don't say another creed about 
the creed — '^I believe in the creed." The 
creed itself is not an object of faith ; and such 
authority as these formulations have is 
mainly the authority of a vast range of ex- 
perience summed up in brief declarations. 
The aim of m^aking such declarations was 
mainly negative ; it was to declare that any 
theory which neglected or ruled out any 
part of this experience must be untrue. In 
fact, most of the formulated Christian doc- 
trines were set down and defined in order to 
rule out certain tendencies of thought. There 
were those who thought that in the life, for 
which Christians claim that it is a perfect 



A Universal Religion 7S 

manifestation of the infinite spirit, there 
was only a partial presence of Divinity ; the 
Church sets down the phrase ^'Perfect God." 
There were those who in their insistence on 
the Divinity lost interest in the Humanity ; 
the Church sets down the phrase ''Perfect 
Man." It is not the concern of creeds to 
reconcile these things with one another. 
That is the task of theologians and of every- 
body interested in the intellectual study of 
the question. The concern of the Creeds is 
with the vitalising experience on which the 
Church depends, and it sets down statement 
after statement to safeguard the fulness of 
that experience against those who would ex- 
plain it away. 

Anyone who wishes to throw overboard 
any of its formulations is incurring a very 
great responsibility. I am not one who 
would claim that the Creeds are necessarily 
final. I do say the weight of authority be- 
hind them is so great that it is improbable 
that we shall find them wrong — supremely 
and enormously improbable. Further, I 
shall draw attention to the fact that they 
are not open to the attack commonly made 



74 The Universality of Christ 

upon them of consisting of Greek philoso- 
phy. If you will actually turn to one of those 
documents and read it, you will see that 
there is hardly any Greek philosophy in it at 
all. Nearly every article states either a fact 
of historical occurrence or else a spiritual 
experience. The statement that Christ was 
crucified under Pontius Pilate is not Greek 
philosophy. There is no Greek philosophy 
in the Apostles' Creed; and there is none in 
the ^^Mcene" Creed except the phrase '*of 
one substance." . . . The emphasis of these 
documents is entirely concentrated upon the 
Life in which the revelation came. 

As I have said, it is quite possible that 
other nations, other forms of civilisation, 
will see in the Divine Revelation elements 
that we have not seen. They will therefore 
produce theologies different from ours. If 
they find it necessary to draw up formula- 
tions of faith different from our formulas, 
forewarning people against intellectual ad- 
ventures which can only end in disaster, by 
all means let them do so. We shall ask them 
to keep in mind the results which come from 
our apprehension of the Divine act, and that 



A Universal Religion 75 

they should not in formulating their appre- 
hension come into conflict with what we have 
formulated as a result of ours. Let them 
have their own formulations ; but they will 
be wise to take account of our experience and 
not throw it aside. 

What we must desire is that, when all men 
have come together into the one allegiance 
of Jesus Christ, there shall be built up inside 
the Church as a whole such a complete un- 
derstanding of Him as can never be possible 
to any isolated race or civilisation. The 
West by itself can never know Christ in His 
fulness; nor can the East. It is only the 
Catholic Church holding them both together 
that can do that. By holding together all 
the different types of religious life, experi- 
ence, and aspiration, it will make available 
for all the treasure of a fuller knowledge 
than any man or any race by itself could 
reach, and will offer to each of us as individ- 
uals the fulness of that knowledge that we 
may live by it. 

These documents, which we call Creeds, 
are all concerned with the Life. I am going 
to consider to-morrow the question whether 



76 The Universality of Christ 

that Life itself so reveals God as to meet the 
philosophical requirements that I have tried 
to outline. I know perfectly well that any- 
one is at liberty to say — ^^ Yes ; no doubt you 
were careful to state the philosophical re- 
quirements in such a way as to be able to 
show us that your faith met them.'' I don't 
deny it for an instant ; but I also point out 
that I have certainly not deliberately falsi- 
fied the statement of the philosophical claims 
with this object. What you have to consider 
is not my motive in presenting them as I do, 
but whether the presentation is true or false. 
If this is, as a matter of fact, the right way 
to approach the philosophical question of 
ultimate truth, then it does not matter that 
I had undoubtedly a strong personal interest 
in showing that the claims of philosophy are 
such that the Christian faith can meet them. 
Let us consider for one moment the charac- 
teristic nature of Life, for which it is claimed 
that through it this full revelation can be 
and has been given. 

The difficulties of the subject entirely arise 
from its being so familiar that we take it all 
for granted and never think about it, so that 



A Universal Religion 77 

it is a very unaccustomed direction for most 
of our minds to take. For the main point 
which I have to urge upon you is that which 
I have already suggested, that in any life you 
do have the necessary, the unique, the irre- 
placeable expression of the spirit that dom- 
inates that life ; and further, that in the de- 
gree in which that spirit is strong and pure 
it gives unity to the life, setting all its phases 
and all its actions in the right proportion; 
and above all this, that the exactness and the 
fulness of the expression entirely depend 
upon the particularity of the conduct. If 
you have a man who is full of religion and 
goodwill towards mankind, pursuing the 
even tenor of his way in a moderately com- 
fortable existence in a small villa in the 
suburbs of a town, distributing his charity 
with genial good-nature and so forth, but 
otherwise living like anybody else, you get 
in such a form of life comparatively little op- 
portunity of expression for the spirit which 
is the universal truth behind it, just because 
it is so like the lives of other people; just 
because it is so general, it fails to express the 
universal, not because there is a conflict be- 



78 The Universality of Christ 

tween the general and the universal, but be- 
cause there is conflict between expression and 
generality. Every artist knows that a uni- 
versal only finds expression in what is per- 
fectly individual. Indeed, individuality is 
the perfect synthesis of universal and par- 
ticular, and if either fails the individuality 
is lessened. The more detailed you make 
the expression, the better expression it will 
be, provided the spirit expressed is always 
constant. If it is, then you will still have 
a unity of all the diverse detailed pieces of 
conduct. Consequently we shall not be sur- 
prised to find in that Life, for which the 
claim is made that it expresses the universal 
spirit, that it belongs to a particular time 
and a particular place, that it was lived 
under the conditions of a comparatively nar- 
row circle of people, sharply marked off 
from all other, that it fully accepts these lim- 
itations and expresses itself in and through 
them. On the contrary, we shall rejoice in 
all that. It is only through such particular- 
ity that our Lord can give any detailed ex- 
pression, which means real expression, of the 
universality of His love. Love above all 



A Universal Religion 79 

things requires such expression ; because love 
must show itself in service to this one and 
that one under the conditions of their exis- 
tence. It cannot be shown merely on the 
broad scale and in general terms. It must 
be individual. Therefore in the close rela- 
tionship between our Lord's historical min- 
istry and the conditions of His time the 
Christian will find no difficulty or perplex- 
ity at all ; for what is important to him is not 
that the Lord did this particular thing or 
uttered this particular precept, but that in 
all of these you find one single spirit pervad- 
ing the whole life, and that a spirit of such 
kind that it can find its operation everywhere 
in all times and in all places and through all 
persons of all races. 

For there is one other requirement which 
a spiritual philosophy will make of any uni- 
versal principle if it is to be accepted as 
the explanation of the world. What is it? It 
is that the spirit itself must be such as can 
operate plainly in all places. Now there are 
two great goals set before us by St John in 
his First Epistle which I have been taking 
as a sort of guiding star of our thought in 



80 The Universality of Christ 

these lectures, which you can always pursue 
with absolute perfection, though one of them 
with more thoroughness of success than the 
other, so that your devotion to them can al- 
ways be complete and active. One is truth 
and one is love. You can always not only 
desire the truth, as you can always desire 
beauty, but you can always be actively pro- 
moting it as you cannot be always creating 
beauty ; you can always be so directing your 
own mind that you are furthering the cause 
of truth in the world. Truth to all fact, and 
truth in all thought. But you may not al- 
ways be able to attain to the truth you seek. 
Love is always supreme over the world in 
this sense at least — ^there is no conceivable 
situation in which it is not possible to show 
absolute perfection of love. I do not think 
there is any other quality of which that can 
be said. At least it is true of love ; and the 
infinite spirit for whom it is claimed that He 
is the source of being and the explanation 
of the world must be at least this, whatever 
else besides — ^perfect and absolute love. 
Nothing else corresponds with this very ob- 
vious fact of universal experience. In one 



A Universal Religion 81 

sense it is so obvious that one is almost 
ashamed to labour the point; but it is also 
overwhelmingly important that wherever 
you are you can practise and show love. 
Does not it tell you a good deal about this 
universe in which we live, that love is one of 
the things, possibly the only thing, that can 
never be excluded by circimistance ? 



Lecture III 

CHRIST THE COMPLETE REVELATION 



Lecture III 

CHRIST THE COMPLETE REVELATION 

Yesterday we passed from the consideration 
of those methods of inquiry which deal with 
the state of the hmnan mind in its religious 
activity to that method of inquiry which en- 
deavours to establish, or estimate approxi- 
mations to, ultimate truth; and we found 
that the one principle known to us, which is 
capable of satisfying the philosophical de- 
mands, is that which we call Spirit. The 
Spirit who meets this intellectual need must 
be One. It is clear that there is a totality of 
things. It is as the explanation of that to- 
tality conceived as such that we have needed 
to find some self-explanatory principle ; and 
we found it in Spirit. As we proceeded we 
passed beyond what seems to be the farthest 
point to which the philosophical method can 
guide us, and came to what Christians claim 
to be the gift of God in a direct revelation 

85 



86 The Universality of Christ 

made through a Divine act. So we were led, 
further, to conceive of this ultimate spirit in 
terms of love. And we found, in our con- 
cluding section, that this also fits in with one 
of the observable facts about the universe, 
namely that love is one of the things, perhaps 
the one thing, that can never be excluded by 
circumstance. 

If this be so, then our conception of the 
unity of the world will not be one that ex- 
cludes the very utmost variety and diversity ; 
for love is always of individuals ; a love that 
is merely a love of things in general or of the 
universe in its totality, apart from concern 
for individuals and apart from any desire 
for a love that shall be returned, is some- 
thing quite different from any love that we 
know, and to call it by the name of love 
would be an abuse of language. If we con- 
ceive the unity of the world, not in the ma- 
terialist terms of substance, but in the spir- 
itual terms of love, then that unity will not 
be the unity of the absolutist philosophy in 
which all distinctions are at last merged, but 
it will be the unity rather of a family, of a 
comradeship where all the different mem- 



The Complete Revelation 87 

bers, with their characteristics unimpaired, 
are united by a common origin, or a common 
purpose, or a common affection. It is this 
unity that ought to be most manifest upon 
earth in the Church ; it is the unity of which 
the supreme expression is that of the Blessed 
Trinity. Please remember, that we are not 
as Christians called upon to go out into the 
world and persuade men that God is a Per- 
son. That would be persuading men to a 
heresy. When we speak of God in personal 
terms, as we are bound to do, we speak of 
Him as three Persons — the Person loving 
and loved in return, the Person loved and 
loving in return, and the personal relation- 
ship between these Persons. There are three 
Persons in the one God; and as Professor 
Webb, in his Gifford Lectures, has been tell- 
ing us, what religion is concerned about is 
not to establish a single centre of conscious- 
ness in the Deity but to secure our faith that 
in the Godhead there is that which can sup- 
port personal relationship with us, when we 
come into fellowship with God. That is what 
matters for religion, and there is no need 
for that to tie down our conception of the 



88 The Universality of Christ 

Divine to the idea of an individual conscious- 
ness wMch is v^liat we generally mean by 
Person. 

With such a conception of the unity of the 
world we are not in any way belittling the 
independent spiritual life that has started 
upon its course in finite spirits. Nor can I 
for a moment believe that that finite life, 
once started, ultimately becomes re-absorbed 
again into the infinite upon which it depends. 
If that were its destiny I could see no use 
in its having ever begun. Why in the world 
should a transcendent unity differentiate it- 
self, even in the realm of ^^ appearance," 
into all the multiplicity of our experience, if 
it is in the end to be — or in ultimate reality 
is all along — ^what it would be if the appar- 
ent multiplicity had never been? Such a 
process is meaningless and therefore philo- 
sophically to be condemned. 

But the meaning of the finite life only be- 
gins to be discovered and its justification 
supplied when we think of the nature of 
God as Love, and of finite life, therefore, as 
the object of that love from which He seeks, 
in each individual, the characteristic answer, 



The Complete Revelation 89 

the typical response. You have a principle 
here which is capable of a limitless expan- 
sion, for there is no limit which can in the 
nature of things be set to the expansion of 
the volume of love ; and the meaning of the 
world is seen to be that the volume of love 
uniting the finite spirits to God the Father of 
spirits, and to one another, should steadily 
increase and swell both in volume and inten- 
sity through the ages. There is at least no 
contradiction in such a notion, and it is in 
the centre of such a scheme that Christians 
set the figure of Christ. Our special subject 
to-day is to ask: ^^Does the historic life of 
Christ meet these requirements?" 

First let us look at it in its bearing upon 
human relationships. What would seem to 
be the most fundamental of all principles 
governing our Lord's ministry? I should 
say, without the smallest hesitation, Liberty. 
He absolutely refuses to take any steps that 
may bring Him adherents other than those 
who are drawn to Him through the motion of 
their own free will. Even His miracles He 
tries as a rule to conceal, because He knows 
that the sort of excitement that they evoke 



90 The Universality of Christ 

is not of a kind to create really devoted, 
freely devoted, adherents. He does not ap- 
peal to them as evidence of His Divinity. 
On the contrary, with regard to the greatest 
of them all — ^the casting out of devils — ^He 
says: ^^ If I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by 
whom do your sons cast them out*?'' It is 
not on power that He rests His claim. John 
the Baptist, who as it would seem had once 
recognised Him, was puzzled in his prison 
by what he heard. He had thought of Him 
as the coming Messiah, the Son of God who 
should inaugurate the Kingdom of God on 
earth. In prison he heard of the works of 
the Christ, and what did they come to ? A 
few blind men made to see, a few deaf men 
to hear, even a few dead people raised up, 
but no renovation of human society, no proc- 
lamation with irresistible power of the law 
of righteousness, no divinely appointed suc- 
cessor of David reigning from Jerusalem: 
none of these things — ^nor any manifestation 
such as the apocalyptic writers had led men 
to expect in the clouds of Heaven. So from 
the prison he sends to ask : '^ Art thou He that 
should come or do we look for another % ' ^ and 



The Complete Revelation 91 

the answer is: ^^Tell John again the things 
that ye do hear and see," and, '^Blessed is 
he whosoever is not scandalised at me."^ 
Why? How is that an answer? Because 
it is not power that is the manifestation of 
the Kingdom of God — not power as men 
ordinarily conceive power — power that is to 
say, that imposes upon men against their 
will. The Kingdom of God is the sover- 
eignty of love. It desires none but willing 
adherents, and its method is never to impose 
allegiance upon men who do not want it. It 
seeks those who from their own free hearts 
offer their devotion. 

It is the power of love only. For this 
reason our Lord begins with an absolute re- 
spect for the personality of all those finite 
spirits which are here the chief recipients 
of the Divine love. And all this culminates 
in the act of revelation from the Divine side. 
For what is the supreme and peculiar feature 
of Deity as revealed in Christ? Trium- 
phant sacrifice. All the great thinkers of 
the world in one way or another came to the 
threshold of that thought; and there they 

* It is a pity not to transliterate here. 



92 The Universality of Christ 

stopped. They have all told us in one way 
or another that every finite thing fulfils its 
destiny so far as it plays its part in the 
scheme of the whole under the guidance of 
the supreme principle. So Plato, for ex- 
ample, sought for justice in the soul; he 
found it to expand into justice in the state, 
and he found that again expand into the Idea 
of Good in the universe ; it is always the same 
principle, namely, that each departmental 
activity, that each psychological faculty or 
power, that each different class of citizens, 
that each different form of being, should 
do its own work, in its own position that it is 
qualified to fill, never claiming more and 
never giving less, according to the supreme 
principle of the universe which allots to each 
its place. We recognise that as broadly the 
sort of teaching that all philosophy gives. 
But what is the claim of that supreme princi- 
ple upon you % Plato, with his great honesty, 
always shows his conviction, that in asking 
a man to be just, you are asking him really 
to give up something good. It would be bet- 
ter for his philosopher-king to contemplate 
eternal truth in selfish enjoyment of it than 



The Complete Revelation 93 

to go back and try to govern the state by his 
wisdom. But he must not do it, and Plato 
lays upon him the hard moral obligation to 
enter into practical life, saying that he will 
render his duty for we are laying a just de- 
mand upon just men. That is all. He can- 
not say it is good for him. On the contrary, 
if the philosopher has gained his wisdom 
not through, but despite, the civilisation in 
which he lives, he will by no means seek to 
save society but will only seek to escape from 
the world without contamination. Plato 
sees no excellence in self-sacrifice. It may 
be a duty, but in itself it is an evil. The 
supreme principle has no claim upon men 
other than the claim of sheer stark duty. 
There is something wanting, something that 
the most aspiring minds had never dared to 
say: That just as the finite spirits are to 
live in service to the Supreme, the Supreme 
exists in service to the finite. That is the 
Cross. 

The Cross is at the centre of Christianity 
not as an episode in history, but as the mo- 
mentary manifestation of eternal truth. 
'*The Word was in the beginning with God" 



94 The Universality of Christ 

—the Word which was His utterance of 
Himself; for love can never be content to 
reside within itself ; it is its very nature that 
it goes out and seeks expression ; and so, be- 
cause God is love eternal, there is the eternal 
utterance of God declaring His nature, so 
that it may be shared. That utterance is 
called His word. It is by the agency of the 
Divine word, or as we may put it in other 
language, it is through the necessity that 
love is under to express itself, that there 
comes into being a universe both to manifest 
and to receive the love of God. And the whole 
of the created universe is, as the great Chris- 
tian theologians have always said, implicit 
in the being of the Word. Then into that 
universe, which all the time is in some meas- 
ure an expression of the Divine Love, there 
comes the full expression, in order to reveal 
to the world what had always been its own 
root principle, so that seeing it, the world 
might be won to a fuller and more complete 
response. 

The Kf e of Christ is a momentary manifes- 
tation of eternal truth ; and it is good for us 
as a devotional exercise sometimes to read 



The Complete Revelation 95 

the Gospels, turning all the past tenses into 
the present, and to remember that what we 
read there is the expression, quite strictly, 
as I was saying yesterday, under all condi- 
tions of the time and place in which the ex- 
pression occurred, of what is always true. 
And the culmination of this utterance is the 
Passion. The ultimate truth about God and 
His relation to the finite spirits is this, that 
*^when He is reviled He reviles not again, 
and when He suffers, He threatens not." 

Now that is the only possible mode of om- 
nipotence in a world that contains free finite 
spirits. Once God had been pleased to create 
beings with hearts and souls capable of 
choosing for themselves — and therefore mor- 
ally certain to choose for themselves in the 
special sense of choosing what they like for 
themselves — ^there was only one way by 
which He could still be omnipotent ; it must 
be by revelation of His love in such a form 
as to win answering love. There can be no 
other. He could have controlled external 
events of course; He could have controlled 
our conduct, by sheer exercise of power; but 
then there would have been something that 



98 The Universality of Christ 

finally and for ever escaped His sovereign- 
ty — ^the heart and will of man, the highest 
thing He had made, the thing for which per- 
haps much of the rest was made. I^ that 
was to be won, it must be won in such a way 
that its allegiance was no contradiction of its 
freedom. Now it is a perfectly common ex- 
perience that when we do things to please 
other people, our action is determined by 
what is their pleasure, and yet our freedom 
is never so complete. There is no act in 
which a man is so entirely self -determining 
as when he deliberately acts for the sake of 
another 's pleasure or another 's welfare. He 
does not in the least degree feel that he has 
been hypnotised or his will over-ridden, or 
that he is a mere passive instrument, reduced 
to a puppet by the other's will. On the con- 
trary, he is then most of all himself ; we know 
it perfectly well. There is all the difference 
in the world between acting in this way from 
love and acting under a kind of coercion that 
some powerful personality has put upon us 
without carrying our consent with him. If 
God is to become the determinant of our 
conduct in such a way as not to paralyse the 



The Complete Revelation 97 

will and heart that He has made, it must be 
by winning our love ; and there is only one 
way, broadly speaking, in which our love 
is drawn out to those to whom it does not 
spontaneously go. 

None of us in human shape are so entirely 
devoid of the capacity of love that we have 
no friends. But there is no supernatural 
merit in loving our friends; it is quite an 
easy thing to do ; as Christ said. Do not the 
publicans the same'? We do not require a 
Divine revelation in order to do that. The 
problem is to love our neighbour — the chance 
person with whom we are brought into con- 
tact by the accidents of life. There are some 
people who find it comparatively easy to 
love the Hottentots and the inhabitants of 
Timbuctoo — or at any rate to act as if they 
did — ^but fail entirely before the test of "\onq 
thy neighbour," the vexatious family next 
door with their irritating habits and aggres- 
sive manners. That is always the test. Do 
you feel any natural sympathy, do you feel 
your hearts go out for the welfare of 
those with whom you are brought into 
casual intercourse, though they may be peo- 



98 The Universality of Christ 

pie of another race such as the Jew whom the 
Samaritan assisted, knowing that if his ac- 
tion ever came out, he would be cut by all 
his friends for all the rest of his life. That 
is the test, and before that test most of us fail 
quite hopelessly and all of us in some degree. 
"We shall, as a matter of fact, only find the 
power to love other men in this way through 
first learning to love God. But there are 
some of those fellow-creatures of ours who 
show us how love may be drawn up from our 
hearts even though it did not spontaneously 
grow. These are those who show love to us, 
and there is no man who can be quite in- 
different to the discovery that someone else 
cares for him enough to be put to serious in- 
convenience and trouble for him. It is not 
the trouble itself ; it is the realisation of the 
love expressed in it that moves us ; and we 
are never quite indifferent. 

Love always expresses^ itself in one way — 
sacrifice. For the essence of sacrifice (now 
that the word has been moralised by Christ) 
is the readiness to do or to suffer something 
which, apart from your love, you would not 
have chosen to do or to suffer. It need not 



The Complete Revelation 9^ 

necessarily be painful, though it often will 
be; but there is the essence of sacrifice the 
moment your will is altered by the considera- 
tion of another's happiness or welfare. Your 
will is then surrendered to their good. As it 
is thus that some men can draw out our affec- 
tion, so it is that God must draw it out. Most 
of us are bound to admit that we are not in 
love with Love ; and our care for love has to 
be drawn out of us by something that is done 
outside of us. At this point the human will 
is simply and utterly powerless. Our free- 
dom does not extend to this point. My will — 
that is to say, my settled purpose in life — 
can control a great many of my impulses, and 
most of us ought to brace our wills up to far 
stricter control of our impulses than we are 
in fact practicing ; but what it cannot do is 
to give itself a new direction. We may, by 
having our eyes opened to the real nature 
of the thing that we are doing, be brought to 
dislike what hitherto we have liked ; we may 
even of ourselves follow out some train of 
thought which shows to us the real result and 
implication of our habit of mind and so be 
brought into remorse, and through remorse 



100 The Universality of Christ 

into repentance, and through repentance into 
change of impulse. But beyond that you 
cannot go. If you are in fact in love with 
things that do not deserve to be loved, you 
can only be altered, not by an effort of your 
own, but by coming into contact with some- 
thing which manifestly deserves much more 
love. You may call this the doctrine of orig- 
inal sin if you like ; the fact is there. Man- 
kind is not going to rise to the heights which 
alone correspond with God's purpose for it 
on the strength of its own resources. And 
that is what the doctrine of original sin 
really means. Something has got to be done 
to us and for us before we are capable of 
being what God desires that we should be- 
come. 

God then, in order to be Omnipotent, and 
in order to fulfil His will concerning us and 
make us the thing that He desires us to be, 
was bound to manifest Himself in sacrifice. 
And that is the first significance of the Cross 
at the centre of the Christian faith. God 
manifested to the world what He is ready to 
bear at the hands of the world in order that 
the world might realise what sin and selfish- 



The Complete Revelation 101 

ness mean to Him; and so the first signifi- 
cance of the Cross is its power to create peni- 
tence. But if the Cross is thus the centre of 
the Christian revelation of God, for which 
we claim that it is an universal revelation, we 
must follow this thought further. There has 
been a great deal of difficulty, some of it 
quite unnecessary, introduced into Christian 
theology, largely by the application of legal 
terms which are not in place. There is a 
reality of judgment, most assuredly ; Christ's 
presence in the world automatically effects 
a judgment ; men are judged or classified as 
on the side of light or on the side of darkness 
by their reaction to the love of Christ. In 
this sense there is a constant operation of 
judgment, and the judgment works itself out 
in historical events, as I shall try to show 
to-morrow. But that common picture of the 
Great Assize is singularly misleading, for it 
begins and ends in a conception of the rela- 
tionship of God and man which is infra- 
Christian. The prisoner in the dock does not 
generally feel himself called upon to suffer 
agonies of remorse by contemplating the 
distress of soul he is occasioning to the 



102 The Universality of Christ 

worthy man on the bench. His sole concern 
with the magistrate or the judge is to find 
what the man is going to do to him. In the 
Law Courts forgiveness means remission of 
a penalty. Forgiveness does not mean that 
between a child and his father. It does not 
mean that between friends. If my friend 
feels outraged and separated from me by 
my conduct, and I want to renew the friend- 
ship, and come to say, *^Can you forgive 
me?" I do not mean, *^I hope you are not 
going to prosecute," and I do not mean, ^^I 
hope you are not going to use the stick." I 
mean ^^Can you let us go on as before in 
spite of it all?" That is what forgiveness 
means — the restoration of the old intimacy 
in spite of the way in which it has been for- 
feited by betrayal. That is what God's for- 
giveness is. ^^We have not received the 
spirit of bondage, the spirit of the slave, 
that we should relapse into fear, but we have 
received the spirit of adoption whereby we 
cry Abba, Father." There is no phrase in 
the New Testament more full of Christian 
experience than that. The whole significance 
of the relationship between master and slave 



The Complete Revelation 103 

is that the slave is told what he has to do, not 
why he has to do it. He is punished if he 
disobeys, and he may possibly be rewarded if 
he carries out the task particularly well. But 
that is the end of the relationship. And that 
is not the relationship between the Christian 
and his Lord. ^^I have not called you ser- 
vants, (or slaves), but friends, for the ser- 
vant knoweth not what his lord doeth, but 
whatsoever I have heard of my Father I 
have made known unto you. ' ' We have been 
brought into the intimacy of God. We know 
His purpose ; we know His character. We 
are not merely given commands to carry out, 
with penalties if we are disobedient. We 
have not received the spirit of bondage or 
slavery that we should fear, but the spirit of 
adoption — (it is of His mercy that He took 
us to Himself) — ^whereby, we cry, in the 
word Christ used in the Garden, '^Abba." 
The fact that that Aramaic word fixed itself 
in the Greek of New Testament is a standing 
witness to the truth that the realisation of 
the Fatherhood of God was something new 
and fresh to those who had learnt to draw 
near to God with Christ as their guide. It 



104 The Universality of Christ 

meant something new. It had been used be- 
fore, but it was something new to those who 
heard Him saying to His Father, Abba. 
From such a Father the forgiveness we seek 
is the forgiveness which restores the old re- 
lationship. And He can offer that forgive- 
ness because He has shown us what it costs 
Him. He is not an angry hostile Deity who 
needs to be propitiated. 

But there is language about propitiation in 
our classical documents. Yes ; for while it 
is true that God always desires our welfare 
and never desires that ill should befall us, 
and in that sense is never hostile to us, yet 
while our souls are sinful there is antago- 
nism in the nature of God against us — some- 
thing that may fitly and rightly be called the 
' ' wrath of God, ' ' just as a father may rightly 
be in antagonism against the evil passions 
which for a moment dominate his child. No 
doubt it is true that God hates sin while He 
loves the sinner; only remember that some- 
times our sin is not something accidental, put 
on like our clothes. Sometimes, and in 
nearly all of us in some respect, it is an es- 
sential characteristic of our nature as we 



The Complete Revelation 105 

now are. My will is not something other 
than myself ; it is myself in action. If my 
will is set on the wrong things, then I am set 
on the wrong things. I am in opposition to 
God, and God for my own sake must be in 
opposition to me. And so there is propitia- 
tion in the sense that there is an alienation 
between God and man, a real antagonism of 
spiritual impulse, to be removed. And 
Christians believe that the antagonism in 
God against us is removed by the sufferings 
of Christ. How so^ Well, if we read our 
New Testament carefully we shall not be 
in any doubt; it is not because the penalty 
due to us has been visited upon Him; that 
would make the Atonement flatly immoral. 
It is because the life of Christ, and above all 
the death of Christ, possesses transforming 
power. 

The centre of St Paul's theology on the 
subject is the great phrase ^'In Christ"; he 
will say that everything that is true of Christ 
is true of the Christian, because the Chris- 
tian is in His Master. If Christ died the 
death penalty of sin, then so did we in Christ. 
We died in Christ; we are risen in Christ. 



106 The Universality of Christ 

Does that sound to us as at least exaggera- 
tion? No, because God sees in us the work 
Christ will one day have accomplished in 
us, and the antagonism ends, not because He 
is satisfied with the sufferings of another on 
our behalf, but because if we are in any de- 
gree united to Christ, if our hearts are in any 
degree open to Him, we shall be moving on 
from stage to stage in the process of trans- 
formation into His likeness till at last ^^when 
He appears we shall be like Him because we 
shall see Him as He is. ' ' And so in the hymn 
we say, ^^ Between our sins and their reward 
we set the passion of Thy Son Our Lord" — 
because we have first said, '^Look, Father, 
look on His anointed face, And only look on 
us as found in Him": not as we are — (^*our 
prayer so languid and our faith so dim") — 
but ^^as found in Him," as we are in the 
light of the transformation that He is al- 
ready accomplishing in us and will carry- 
through to perfection unless we resolutely 
block the way. So all that language about 
the propitiatory aspect of the Cross must 
always be combined with the other great 
Christian doctrine that we are ^^In Christ" 



The Complete Revelation 107 

— already in the sense that our hearts (we 
trust) are open to His influence, and pros- 
pectively in the conviction that that influence 
will at last transform us into His own like- 
ness. 

But once more is not this whole attitude of 
God to the evil of the world fundamentally 
immoral? Has God any right to restore us 
to the old relationship when once we have 
sinned at all? Here you come to another 
aspect of the necessity of the Cross as the 
centre of a religion which is also to be a phi- 
losophy. There is a moral danger in forgive- 
ness. Human forgiveness is terribly often 
tainted with it, and we have all known lately 
during the war the real difficulty of forgive- 
ness which shall be free from the charge that 
it makes light of evil and condones sin. We 
have known that those who have resisted the 
movement of the spirit of forgiveness in our 
country towards Germany, for example, 
have rested their case partly on the insis- 
tence that we must not overlook the atrocities 
that Germany committed. Well, there are 
many answers to that particular plea. It 
comes very near to setting up man in the 



108 The Universality of Christ 

place of God. It ignores certain actions 
committed by our own nation in various 
parts of the world, for which we also have 
to seek forgiveness. But when we come to 
this thought in relation to our conception of 
God, it is true that it would be bad for man- 
kind to be assured that God forgives their 
sins, if that were all ; because then mankind 
could say, ^^ After all, He does not much 
mind: it is all right." It is not all right. 
The doctrine of the forgiveness of sin would 
be immoral if there were not a Cross. But 
no Christian is ever going to say, ^^It is all 
right; God did not really mind"; for the 
Christian has heard the word of pardon from 
the lips of the Crucified, and no man who has 
knelt at the foot of the Cross to receive his 
pardon will go away and say, ^^He did not 
mind. ' ' He minded, and He minds now, with 
an intensity which can only be expressed in 
the fact that it gives Him the Agony and the 
Bloody Sweat, it gives Him three hours of 
anguish and that appalling sense of desola- 
tion when it seemed that the cause of God 
had failed, that God had failed Himself. 
That is what our sin means, and because He 



The Complete Bevelation 109 

has manifested this He can receive us back 
to His heart without any danger of lowering 
our moral standard or weakening our moral 
fibre. On the contrary, to any man who 
really believes, evil assiunes a terror that it 
never had before. There is a depth of mean- 
ing in that marvellous saying in the Psalms : 
^^ There is mercy with Thee; therefore shalt 
Thou be feared. " 

That, I venture to say, is the central point, 
the distinctive factor, in the Christian con- 
ception of God. It is that God wins His way 
in the world, not by over-riding, but by win- 
ning out of men's hearts a perfectly free 
allegiance, through the revelation of what 
their alienation from Him costs Him. That 
is the inner secret of the love of God. Is that 
a revelation which has any special signifi- 
cance for particular races, for particular 
times, particular civilisations ? Plainly not. 
Plainly it is wholly independent of all those 
conditions. It goes right under all of them 
to those matters of the spiritual life in which 
all of us are perfectly at one. In the end of 
the day there are two poles and about one 
of them our life must centre : love which is 



110 The Universality of Christ 

God, and self. And the only question in the 
spiritual life in the last resort is whether 
our lives are set more in one direction or 
more in the other. At the moment no doubt 
most of us are hovering with a good deal of 
uncertainty between them. The course of 
our life is more like an ellipse about the two 
poles than a circle about either of them. But 
it is probably being drawn nearer to one or 
the other of those poles. To become centred 
upon love of God, to care for the good things 
of the spirit, love and joy and peace, and all 
those excellencies by the possession of which 
we are united to other men, is salvation ; and 
to become wholly centred upon self and to 
care for the good things possession of which 
separates us from other people and excludes 
other people from a like possession, is dam- 
nation. These are the two goals possible to 
the human soul, and towards one or other we 
are moving. The whole ^^ scheme of salva- 
tion" is the process of transforming us out 
of selfishness into love. But there is nothing 
in that which belongs to Europe or to West- 
ern civilisation that is not equally applicable 
to every human being. The way in which it 



The Complete Revelation 111 

is presented, the way in wMcli the whole mat- 
ter is set, may vary indefinitely. The ele- 
ments which receive most emphasis will 
vary; sometimes it is the removal of the 
alienation between God and our will ; some- 
times our mystical incorporation in the per- 
son of Christ ; sometimes the suffering in the 
heart of God which our sin causes Him, and 
by the revealing of which He is able without 
any demoralising influence to receive us into 
perfect fellowship with Himself, however 
often we betray His trust. One or another 
of these may receive more emphasis under 
different conditions of human civilisation, 
but the central conception of God giving 
Himself in love to the world and thereby 
uniting the world to Himself in free surren- 
der of the finite will to the supreme Spirit 
which has so revealed itself — ^that is not par- 
ticular in the sense of belonging to only one 
time or place; it belongs to the universal 
nature of spirit. And it is so that we claim 
that the revelation that was given once at a 
particular time in a particular place, in 
Palestine under Pontius Pilate, is a revela- 
tion to all men and to all places for ever. 



112 The Universality of Christ 

The one thing we are bound to require, as 
it seems to me, is that men shall say that this 
Christ is very God, not for the sake of doing 
honour to Jesus of Nazareth — He did not 
claim honour for Himself — but because 
every thought of God which is not in accord 
with the character of Jesus Christ is idola- 
try, a false image of God ; and the more we 
dwell upon it, the worse it will be for us. 
' ' This is the true God and Eternal Life. My 
little children, keep yourself from idols." 
These are perhaps the last words written in 
the New Testament, and they certainly sum 
it all up. We cannot ever have truce with 
the suggestion that Jesus of Nazareth was 
divinely inspired as others have been 
divinely inspired, and that God appears in 
certain aspects of His being in Him and in 
certain other aspects elsewhere ; the moment 
that line is taken, you destroy conviction at 
the central point, namely that God is one 
Whose character we know and know in per- 
fect definiteness of outline, because it is the 
character of Jesus Christ. That is the 
Christian claim. We are, of course, very 
far from denying that men may learn abun- 



The Complete Revelation 113 

dantly from Christ without accepting the 
whole of that claim ; and we are only too glad 
that they should do so. His treasures are 
for all mankind, and that all men should 
enter into them as they may and will must be 
a matter of happiness to His disciples. But 
nothing else than this is acceptance of the 
Christian religion. This is the Christian 
faith. This, we believe, is the power that can 
save the world. 



Lecture IV 

DOES CHRISTIANITY WORK? 



Lecture IV 



DOES CHRISTIANITY WORKi 



The words with whidi I closed yesterday- 
were that to faith in Christ we look for the 
salvation of the world. Do we look in vain ? 
Does Christianity work? That is not only 
a practical question; it is fully in place in 
the consideration of the intellectual setting 
of our faith. For Christianity claims to be 
a religion of power, and if in fact it does not 
work, unless we can find the sources of the 
weaknesses that have beset the Church and 
also the way to cure these weaknesses, then 
the practical failure is a demonstration of 
the falsity of the doctrine. There is no other 
religion in which practical failure would be 
so fatal to the claims of theoretical truth. 

We have claimed that the Almighty God is 
revealed in Christ, and to that end that 
Christ Himself must be the Almighty God. 
What can be the meaning of that in the world 

117 



118 The Universality of Christ 

we know ? The urgency of this problem is 
intensified, I think, by the modern, but I am 
sure also the true way, in which most people 
to-day approach the question. Most of the 
earlier theologians could be content to say 
that God took upon Himself human nature 
and lived in the world under the form of 
human nature, but that in the Incarnate 
there was no human Person; according to 
their doctrine the Person is God only, His 
divine nature being associated with human 
nature. 

We have come to know a good deal more 
about human nature than the earlier theo- 
logians did, and that mainly through Chris- 
tianity itself. We have discovered in a very 
large measure something which was very 
vaguely apprehended by the older thinkers, 
namely Personality. It is a significant fact 
— perhaps you can lay a little too much stress 
upon it — ^but it is at least a significant fact 
that there is no word for personality in 
Latin, and no word for it in Greek. The 
word was coined to represent an idea which 
came into increasing prominence through 
men's knowledge of God and their resultant 



Does Christianity Work? 119 

knowledge of Man. And as we study human 
nature, most of us at any rate have come to 
the conclusion that human nature, which is 
not fully individual, is not perfect human 
nature; therefore if our Lord was truly 
Man, then He was also a man. I daresay in 
this audience it is hardly worth while to in- 
sist on that point of view, because, according 
to my experience, most of the people in our 
universities feel quite sure that He was a 
man. The question they are asking is 
whether He was also God, and in what sense 
He is inclusively Man. Remember, the old 
Church was altogether convinced He was 
Man, and very nearly unanimously con- 
vinced that He was not a man at all. He was 
the person of God living through human na- 
ture, but not a human person ; that was the 
main trend of the older theology. Yet, as 
I say, I am quite sure that this newer claim 
that we must see in Him a human individual 
as well as the Divine Person is a sound 
claim, and you will rightly say to me — ^^How 
are the two to be connected?" So I must 
pause in the general process of my argument 



120 The Universality of Christ 

to deal with this question, although it must 
be in short space. 

First I will say this : supposing Christian- 
ity is true ; supposing that our Lord is indeed 
a man and also God, you must not expect — 
it is monstrously unreasonable to expect — a 
complete detailed psychology of His Person. 
That a man who is not God should offer a 
psychological account of a man who is also 
God would be monstrously presumptuous. 
We cannot expect to grasp that mystery and 
analyse it as we can analyse, to some extent, 
our own states of consciousness. If the doc- 
trine is true, it will baffle our minds at least 
until we also are perfectly united with 
Christ and in Him with God. And therefore 
we are not to expect that we shall find the 
kind of demonstration which makes every- 
thing seem neat and tidy; but we have the 
right to expect to find certain clues, various 
strands connecting up what must remain to 
us two aspects of our Lord's person, the 
hmnan and the divine, in such a way that, 
as we follow up these clues, we obtain a pro- 
gressive understanding, never complete, but 



Does Christianity Work? 121 

always deeper and deeper, of that supreme 
mystery. 

Now if we are to claim for our Lord that 
He is really ruler of the world, we are bound, 
I think, in some shape or form to assent to 
that doctrine that we were glancing at yes- 
terday of His inclusive personality. The 
root of it is the Christian's experience ex- 
pressed by St Paul in the words ^^In 
Christ." The Christian feels himself to be 
taken up into the personality of Christ, pos- 
sessed by His Spirit, but yet not, as we saw, 
in such a way as to abrogate or annihilate 
the freedom of his own will. This bond- 
service is perfect freedom; and from that 
Christian thinkers have generalised, and 
have said that in Christ we see the human 
race collectively represented in one essential 
symbol, by which I mean a symbol which is 
itself a perfect instance of the thing it sym- 
bolises. We have, therefore, two sides 
always to consider, and the two sides are 
both in the New Testament. Sometimes 
St Paul speaks of Christ as being Himself 
the whole Church ; the Church is His body. 
But at other times. He is the head, and other 



122 The Universality of Christ 

members are necessary to the fulness of the 
body. So here Christ is the hmnan race, 
corporately and prospectively. In Him we 
see what it is the purpose of God to accom- 
plish in all men, and what God through Him 
and by means of Him is accomplishing ; and 
in Him also we see individually the first- 
fruits of humanity. He is the one man, 
chosen out from many sons of men, to be a 
perfect representative of humanity before 
God, and so far He stands as an individual 
apart from us in the individuality of His 
perfect human nature. But He is also that 
in which we see what we are to become, and 
therefore He seems to be in Himself all 
mankind. How can we understand this 
better? 

First let us recall what was said in the 
second lecture, that any expression of a great 
truth depends for its power on the expres- 
sion being perfectly individual. You know 
that, as soon as you consider any dramatic 
figure. Othello is a great expression of 
human jealousy, because he is a very indi- 
vidual jealous man. But if the dramatist 
merely stages an abstraction, who has no 



Does Christianity Work? 123 

individual characteristics at all and merely 
acts according to the type for which he 
stands, then you get no real expression; 
you get only an allegory, and no dramatic 
experience. It is only by individualising 
that you can get expression; and that is 
as true of universal truth as it is of any 
particular truth. The love of God, if it 
is to be fully expressed, must be expressed 
in individual form. That individual form 
we find in the individuality of Jesus Christ, 
which has been set forth before us once 
for all by the evangelists, particularly the 
Synoptic Evangelists. The Humanity there 
set forth is undoubtedly individual. We 
are reading of a human person. But that 
human person is so completely surrendered 
to God that in sober truth the Person of 
Jesus Christ is God; and only because this 
is so can He claim the allegiance of all men 
and so become inclusively Man. 

We pass on to the consideration that what 
we find in the spiritual life is not something 
wholly alien from what we find in the normal 
life, but is the ordinary natural power trans- 
formed through its being raised to an alto- 



124 The Universality of Christ 

gether fresh intensity; and that is what we 
should expect if the position claimed in the 
first two lectures is true, namely that the 
whole universe is itself in its degree an ex- 
pression of the mind and character of the 
God Who is fully revealed in Christ. Nature 
is not something alien from Christ. It is the 
lower stages of the process which finds the 
expression of its fundamental principle in 
Him. Let me illustrate this continuity of 
the natural and the spiritual. There is the 
fact of influence, and there is the undoubted 
fact that we are capable of concentrating our 
influence. If a number of people get to- 
gether and resolutely direct their will-power 
upon some object that they have at heart, 
for example, the sustaining of someone en- 
gaged in a great enterprise, there is no doubt 
whatever they send forth power to sustain 
him. There can be little doubt either that 
collections of people — or for the matter of 
that also individual persons — ^but mainly 
collections, possessed by feelings of hatred 
and antagonism, damage those against whom 
their hatred is directed. That is the basis of 
the possibility of intercession. But in inter- 



Does Christianity Work? 125 

cession you bring in a new factor. You don 't 
direct your will immediately upon its object, 
but you direct it there through the universal 
knowledge and love of God, and you are not 
only releasing powers in God, which He is 
able to set in motion in answer to faith — 
(because it would have been bad for us if 
He set them in motion if there had been no 
faith in as much as that would have stimu- 
lated our self-reliance and so have done us 
harm) — ^but also you are sending your own 
energy to be united with His loving care and 
directed by His loving knowledge into chan- 
nels truer and more effective than your own 
limited love and wisdom could have sug- 
gested. 

What intercession rests upon is the po- 
tency of concentrated influence. But you 
can go farther than that. Every great per- 
sonality exercises an influence upon those 
round about him and upon posterity. As 
men come to understand, there leaps out 
from their own souls answering power, in 
the shape of some capacity to enter into the 
achievements, or at least the endeavours, of 
the great personality. That is the natural 



126 The Universality of Christ 

form, or the embryonic form in our limited 
experience, of what in the working of God is 
called the Holy Ghost. God had always 
been at work in the world, but only when He 
had revealed Himself in such a fashion that 
men could understand, so that their hearts 
went out in answer, could He release within 
their souls that Divine capacity which is 
implanted in men because they are God's 
children; only therefore when He had re- 
vealed His love was it possible for Him to 
exercise the fulness of His power over their 
lives. It is that fulness of Divine power over 
the lives of men which is specifically called 
the Holy Spirit, who therefore is said, quite 
rightly, to '^sanctify all the elect people of 
God" — ^that is to say, those who are chosen 
out among mankind to receive that greatest 
of all treasures, the fullest knowledge of 
God. It can only be so. That quality of 
human obedience and therefore that quality 
of divine control are only possible on those 
terms. Therefore, as St John says with 
absolute cogency, ^^ There was not yet spirit 
because Jesus was not yet glorified.'^ The 
completion of the revelation of the love of 



Does Christianity Work? 127 

God in Christ's Life and Death and Resur- 
rection and Ascension must come before this 
power of God can operate on the human soul, 
because the power consists in the particular 
kind of response which is made to love that 
is shown. This Holy Spirit of God coming 
thus through Christ is the Spirit of our Lord, 
is God in Christ in action amongst us, calling 
forth the divine power that is Himself out 
of our souls, so that as God commands from 
Heaven and as God pleads from Calvary, 
God out of our souls makes answer. 

It is thus that the individual personality 
of Christ becomes all-embracing, just as a 
great leader of men may be said to carry 
them in himself and his will governs their 
action, not by hypnotism but by their volun- 
tary allegiance to him. So in this case the 
same principle is carried to the utmost pos- 
sible limit; because His love, as shown, is 
infinite, therefore there can be no barriers 
set to its all-embracingness. Christ, the in- 
dividual man, necessarily becomes the all- 
embracing personality, because through Him 
all-embracing love is made known. 

We have lately become familiar with the 



128 The Universality of Christ 

psychology of crowd-consciousness. We do 
not as yet know very much about it, but we 
know enough to be aware that we are on the 
threshold of immensely important discov- 
eries concerning human nature and the laws 
of its development; and we know broadly 
that the moral level of crowd-consciousness 
is always higher or lower than the average 
of the individuals composing the crowd. If 
the crowd is met together in the pursuit of an 
ideal end, then in the crowd there will be 
greater forces of idealism than in the aver- 
age of the members composing it, taken 
separately ; and quite equally, if it is met to- 
gether for a selfish end or in hatred and 
antagonism, those spirits will be more 
potent than they are with the average mem- 
bers of the crowd. This is the basis of the 
Church. The Church is a corporate person- 
ality. It exists to be a centre of crowd- 
consciousness. But here the crowd-con- 
sciousness is not only something more ideal- 
istic than the average members who make up 
the Church ; it is the person of Christ Him- 
self. Because two or three are gathered to- 
gether in His Name, He is in the midst of 



Does Christianity Work? 129 

them and they become members of His body. 
The Spirit wliich works through them is the 
same spirit which perfectly worked through 
the individual man Jesus of Nazareth. He 
is not only a man, but also Man ; but in order 
of time He is a man first. By virtue of the 
power of love and the operation of the prin- 
ciples of corporate consciousness working 
through the society of His disciples He be- 
comes increasingly all-inclusive — Man ; and 
only so is He quite perfectly representative 
of the divine purpose. 

So St Paul saw it. In the Church all the 
old divisions had vanished; allegiance to 
Christ over-rode them. '^ There is neither 
Jew nor Greek; there is neither bond nor 
free ; there is neither male or female ; for ye 
are all one man in Christ Jesus. ' ' All the old 
divisions had become negligible. There was 
one man ; and that man was Christ Jesus. If 
the will of Christ prevails throughout a so- 
ciety, for all practical purposes Christ is the 
only person there. So Christ is the Person 
of the Church as God is the Person of Jesus 
Christ. 

St Paul goes on to say that at present this 



130 The Universality of Christ 

body of Christ is imperfect. It needs to be 
built up into its fulness; and we need to 
bring all men into the allegiance of Christ 
until we come to a perfect man — (not each 
of us separately become a perfect man; that 
is an entirely dull conception) — ^but until we 
all together make up the ^^one man in Christ 
Jesus" grown to full stature, ^'the measure 
of the stature of the completeness of the 
Christ" 

Then we turn back to the actual world. 
We have got a clue now. Even if we do not 
see the whole claim of Christianity at work, 
we see how it might come to work. So we 
turn back to our chief task in this conference, 
the comparison of Christ's standards with 
the world's practices, and the question of 
what we are going to do about it. Here let 
me enter a caveat. ^^ Christian ethics" is a 
purely historic term. A thing does not be- 
come right by being Christian. Rather it 
becomes Christian by being right. It is his- 
torically true that we discover a great many 
moral principles through Christ, but the 
righteousness of them and the obligation to 
obey them does not depend upon the author- 



Does Christiamty Work? 131 

ity from wMch they came. A thing is not 
right because God conamands it; God com- 
mands it because it is right, and it is possible 
that the divinely inspired — or rather, to 
avoid a question-begging term — the aspiring 
conscience of a man, who does not at all 
accept the divinity of Christ, may indepen- 
dently be brought to the acceptance of prin- 
ciples which we have learned from Christ. 
Their rightness or wrongness depends upon 
themselves. What we come to Christ for is 
chiefly the power to live as He teaches ; that 
is why our question — Does Christianity 
work? is so crucial. 

The problem has two main limbs. First, 
the world, as we look at it, does not seem 
to reveal a God of Love. If we leave the 
Incarnation out for a moment and look at 
the rest of creation, it does not look as if 
Almighty Love had made and sustained it. 
That of course led in the early Church to the 
Marcionite heresy that the Creator of the 
World, the God of the Old Testament, was 
an inferior and even rather an evil Deity; 
and that the God of the New Testament as 
revealed in Jesus Christ was someone quite 



132 The Universality of Christ 

different. Mr H. Gr. Wells has lately re- 
vived this heresy. 

That is one limb of the problem ; and the 
other — ^to ns more serious — is that so many 
who are not Christians in doctrine are much 
more Christlike in life than some of those 
who are Christians. 

But the world does reveal the supremacy 
of love, first even in the bare struggle for 
existence in the evolutionary process. There 
you see quite clearly this principle : that the 
chief means by which a species succeeds, 
even in the competitive struggle, is by being 
co-operative. It is as the individuals hold 
together, and as individual interests are 
postponed to that of the species, that success 
is achieved. Co-operation is supreme over 
mere competition even at that level, and even 
in the purely competitive struggle. That is 
something already. When we turn to human 
civilisation we see the revelation of the 
supremacy of love in the judgment of God 
at work in history. Think what it means to 
say that love is supreme over the world. To 
say that God is Love means, amongst other 
things, that every purpose or policy which is 



Does Christiamty Work? 133 

hostile to love, wHch rests on selfishness, is 
bound to end in disaster, for it is opposing 
the supreme principle of existence ; and that 
every purpose or policy which is akin to love 
is bound to succeed, through whatever sacri- 
fices it may first pass, because it is fighting 
in alliance with the supreme power. And in 
fact, at least in some measure, this judgment 
is apparent. Our Lord was careful to con- 
nect up His great sayings about His own 
coming in Judgment with the fall of Jeru- 
salem — so much so that it is often difficult 
to know to which of the two He is referring. 
That is because they are not altogether two, 
but partly one. Jerusalem fell because of 
those qualities in it which led to the rejection 
of Christ, not through an angry God inter- 
vening to vindicate His outraged honour, but 
because this race, called to spiritual service, 
preferred secular ambition; that secular 
ambition made it a nuisance to Imperial 
Rome; Imperial Rome was not tolerant of 
nuisances ; it was wiped out. Our Lord saw 
what was bound to happen. But when Jeru- 
salem fell from that quality which led it to 
reject the Lord, the Son of Man came in His 



134 The Universality of Christ 

power. The authority of Law is vindicated 
when it operates against them who have 
broken it. But from the law of man there is 
escape ; from the law of God there is none. 
And as you go down the great historic catas- 
trophes you see that civilisations fell because 
they were based on principles other than 
those of Christ. Rome fell mainly because 
its whole strength was sapped by the institu- 
tion of slavery and the handing over to slaves 
of one after another of the activities that 
properly belonged to citizens. Mediaeval 
Europe broke up because its Church had 
been false to the standards of religion, and 
fell back to gross worldliness. The French 
Revolution came because the old regime de- 
nied the rights of personality which were 
primary in the Christian conception of man. 
And we have seen a mighty nation, which 
declared that its welfare was its sole objec- 
tive, also reduced to great desolation. In 
every one of these instances the Son of Man 
came in His power. 

This judgment of Christ goes all the way 
down history. That is not cruel, because the 
aim that God has for us is not first our 



Does Christianity Work? 135 

happiness, but first that we should become 
filled with that love which is the deepest 
thing in His nature and the best thing in 
the universe. And so the Incarnate Love, 
on the very threshold of His complete 
revelation of love, says of Himself : ' ' This is 
the stone which the builders rejected and is 
become the head of the corner; whosoever 
shall fall on this stone shall be broken, but 
on whomsoever it shall fall, it will scatter 
him like dust." It is a fearful thing to fall 
into the hands of the living Love. 

What love demands from us and seeks 
from us is not that we should be comfortable, 
but that we should be loving. It is quite true 
that the joy which comes with love is deeper 
joy than any other which can be found. It is 
quite true that even the supreme sacrifice 
was offered because of the joy which lay be- 
fore Him, the redemption of the world from 
selfishness into love. But if you are thinking 
about happiness you will never find it ; and 
so our Lord never said anything even re- 
motely like this: '*If any man will come 
after Me I will deliver him from the pains of 
Hell, and give him the joys of Heaven' '; but 



136 The Universality of Christ 

''it any man would come after Me let Mm 
deny himself" — (let Mm say lie is not there : 
it is a terrific paradox) — *^and take up his 
cross" — put the rope round his neck. That 
is the quality of the demand, because the 
quality of love that is asked of us is a love 
completely dedicated. And because love is 
the best tMng in the world, it is relentlessly 
stern against all self-seeking. Those who 
are self-centred will often feel the sternness 
of God before they can draw near to His 
tenderness. That truth stands out in the 
Gospel. The failure of the Pharisees is their 
self-complacent hardness and rigidity; and 
against that hard self-satisfaction there is 
launched the most terrific denunciation that 
you will find in literature — all the more ter- 
rible because there is no trace in it of per- 
sonal spite, but a stark antagonism against 
the whole psychosis, which must be crushed 
before it can be renewed under the power of 
love. In such sternness, as in the judgments 
of God in history, you do see the supremacy 
of Christ so far. Of course, it is true that 
the purpose of a law is never to send people 
to prison for breaking it, but to prevent them 



Does Christianity Work? 137 

from doing the things for which they might 
be committed to prison. And that, of course, 
the law by itself never can do. There are 
those against whom it is necessary to use this 
kind of force, spiritual if not physical ; but 
that is purely preparatory in order that 
when humility has been attained love may 
make its appeal in its own natural form of 
service and sacrifice, and so the true life be 
called forth. 

We turn to the second question. Is it true 
that Christians are not better than other 
people ? Of course it is true that there are 
some non-Christians who are better than 
some Christians. The trouble begins so soon 
as the Church can take its great central 
truths for granted. That happened in the 
Middle Ages ; the central truths became com- 
monplaces and therefore lost grip upon the 
imagination. Men came to concern them- 
selves about secondary matters, almost to 
the exclusion of the primary, and the Church 
itself became self-satisfied and worldly. 
And we are not out of that yet. It was 
Spinoza who bitterly asked why Christians 
differed from others not in love or joy or 



138 The Universality of Christ 

peace, or in any of the fruits of the Spirit, 
but only in the opinions which they held. 
But over against this it is true that there is 
a life in the Church which is without parallel 
on the face of the globe, a life which perpetu- 
ally breaks out again and again when men 
suppose it is all over and done with. The 
Agnostics of England in the 'sixties and 
'seventies had a phrase they were fond of 
using: ''We do not propose to refute Chris- 
tianity : we shall explain it. ' ' They regarded 
it already as a back-number for all intellec- 
tual purposes. They would explain how this 
delusion arose. It was not worth while to 
demonstrate where or how its doctrines were 
fallacious. No one would speak like that 
now. The Church is again a great force, and 
is a great deal more powerful now than in the 
eighteenth or first half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. There may be more people standing 
aloof from it because it is less tolerant of 
indifference and apathy in its members, but 
there is a far greater volume of life inside it. 
We have been witnessing a great religious 
revival which has been spreading from the 
time when John Wesley swept into the arid 



Does Christianity Work? 139 

controversies of the eighteenth century like 
the wind on the hilltops, through the time 
when the Oxford movement began building 
up a fresh conception of the corporate life, 
and liberal theology emphasised afresh the 
claim of intellectual truth, till now in our 
own day, there is a coming together of differ- 
ent parts of the Church with all their dif- 
ferent experiences of the treasures of Christ. 
There is life in the Church ; and if you will 
look at it in history and not only compare 
our present practice with the ideal we have 
before us, though we must always be doing 
that, you will not have any doubt that there 
is a power of the love of God at work in the 
world through the Church. It is true that 
Christ expands Himself into this corporate 
person of the Church, and will at last build 
up a humanity which He can present to the 
Father with Himself, so that God may be 
all in all. 

In the earlier lectures I tried to show 
ground for thinking that the universe is a 
spiritual system, but of course it is true that 
the resources of the spirit are not exhausted 
in the universe as we know it. That con- 



140 The Universality of Christ 

struction whicli I offered you, and which I 
wish you to consider upon its own merits 
and not because it is a convenient introduc- 
tion to what follows, prepares the way for 
the reception of the belief that as we have 
one creation built up stage by stage through 
the evolutionary processes, every stage find- 
ing its own meaning, only when the next 
comes upon it and completes and crowns it, 
so there are resources in the spiritual region 
of the universe that are by no means ex- 
hausted; and that the Holy Spirit of God 
which is at work all through the process is 
made perfectly manifest in Christ and by 
that perfect manifestation secures the ful- 
ness of His power over human lives. For 
there is one God ; and if Jesus Christ is the 
express image of the person of the Father, so 
He is the perfect portrait of the Holy Ghost, 
and when we want to know who is this Holy 
Spirit that prompts us in our own souls, we 
shall read the Gospels just as we do when we 
seek to find out who is the world's Creator. 
I think it is a coherent scheme which I 
have presented to you. I think it all holds 
together and makes up one consistent whole 



Does Christianity Work? 141 

more capable of reconciling in one system 
all the facts of experience than any other 
that I have come across. But it is not 
proved. It is offered as a hypothesis. That 
is to eay, it is a matter of faith ; and faith is 
not knowledge. Faith means that we take 
this thing on trust and mean to live by it and 
see whether it vindicates itself in practical 
working. All faith is experiment ; and you 
cannot have the result of an experiment un- 
less you make the experiment. What we are 
now needing primarily is just courage — 
courage to put the thing to a practical test. 
It needs no courage, of course, to say to 
people that the creator of the physical uni- 
verse, the animal world and our own bodies, 
is somebody who is revealed in our Lord. 
There are theoretical difficulties about it, 
some of which I have tried to indicate and 
have shown how I would begin to meet them. 
That does not want courage. What requires 
courage is to live in actual practice on the 
hypothesis that love is the supreme power in 
the world, and that success or failure de- 
pends on the harmony of our wills with love. 
There is no loss of freedom in such a belief. 



142 The Universality of Christ 

If you come to the edge of a cliff, it depends 
on yourself whether you will jump over or 
not. But when once you have jumped over, 
it no longer depends upon you whether you 
will go to the bottom or not. No one feels, 
however, that he is under any constraint be- 
cause of the inexorableness of the law of 
gravitation ; his will remains free, but he has 
this useful information about the universe 
by which to direct his choice. And inci- 
dentally it is worth while to point out that 
we cannot choose at all unless we can with 
practical certainty count on the consequences 
of our action. It is only the normal fixity of 
natural law which makes possible any valu- 
able freedom of choice. And the relation of 
law to freedom is the same in the spiritual 
world. If it is true that God is Love, then 
in every choice we make we are standing on 
the edge of a precipice. You can, if you like, 
make a selfish choice ; and if you do you will 
be dashed to pieces sooner or later, and you 
will take others to destruction with you. 
That destruction may not be the last word. 
God may always, even to the end, have re- 
sources still in His Almighty Love by which 



Does Christianity Work? 143 

He will recall back all souls at last to Him- 
self and save them from the results of their 
self-will and from that self-will itself. But 
in any calculable period of time you will, by 
your selfish choice, have involved yourself in 
loss, perhaps in ruin. There is no imposition 
upon your will ; and what Love seeks is not 
a number of automata working as the wires 
are pulled, but a free response which need 
not be given, and whose value consists in the 
fact that you need not give it. 

Because so many men do choose to do the 
selfish thing, the world is still apparently 
hostile to Love, and we see the supremacy of 
Love still very largely through its judgments 
on the selfishness of men as they overtake the 
world, and in the calamities that men bring 
upon themselves — not, allow me to say once 
more, by the angry intervention of a Deity 
whose honour is outraged, but by the steady 
operation of those laws by which He made 
the universe and which we can know, at least 
in the sense in which faith gives us knowl- 
edge. 

Here is the view of things which is, I 
think, intellectually most probable. But 



144 The Universality of Christ 

faith rests not upon estimates of intellectual 
probability, but primarily on an apprecia- 
tion of moral values. The man of faith is a 
man who says: ^^I cannot prove that the 
world is like that, but it would be so splendid 
if the world were like that, that I will live 
accordingly. If I have made a mistake, then 
I shall have died for a noble project. If I 
have not made a mistake, then I have done 
something for the greatest end that could be 
set before men. ' ' That is faith. It is not yet 
quite religious faith, because a religious man 
believes that he knows who has set this 
supreme end before men, and that with this 
Author of his faith he is in fellowship. He 
is one who says : *^ Though I cannot commu- 
nicate this to another, yet I have the absolute 
certainty of the fellowship of Him in whom 
my trust is put. He has endured; He is 
enduring; and always through His endur- 
ance He brings about the victory which is 
the winning of free spirits to Himself. The 
world belongs to Love." 

THE END 



